Today's episode is a fan favorite.
The audio in the story has been remastered for today's episode.
On a dark fall night in 2010, two detectives stood in the street of an upscale suburban neighborhood just outside of Boston Massachusetts.
In the middle of the road lit by their flashlights lay the body of a teenage boy.
Now, these were two veteran detectives, but neither of them had ever seen the type of brutal violence that had clearly been inflicted on this young man.
His legs looked shattered, his jeans had been ripped to shreds, and his face was bruised and broken.
The detectives felt sure this young man had been murdered, but because he had no ID on him, they didn't know who he was.
However, when they did finally discover his identity, this case would take a totally bizarre turn.
The detectives would find themselves a thousand miles away from their crime scene, sifting through reported sightings of their victim that defied the laws of physics, and also grasping at an insane theory that they hoped could somehow tie it all together.
So if that's of interest to you, please buy a Highway Billboard ad with the follow button's phone number on it and promise a 1000 reward to the person who calls and does the best Elmo impression.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
On the night of November 15th 2010, a 16-year-old boy named Delvante Tisdale curled his body into a tight ball and inched forward deeper into the dark, cramped chamber where he was hiding.
He tried to take deep breaths and stay calm, but he was scared.
He felt the chamber lurch and shudder and he realized he was moving.
It was really cold and Delvante started to shiver, so he pulled his knees tighter to his body.
He had never felt so completely and totally alone in his whole life.
Delvante knew no one from his family was out looking for him.
Why would they be?
It was normal for him to be out of the house for hours at a time, even on the weekends.
Delvante was a standout high school student who got good grades and was involved in several extracurricular activities.
He also spent a lot of time with his Reserve Officers Training Corps, or ROTC group, which is a club for students who are interested in the military.
Delvante dreamed of joining the United States Air Force after graduation and he figured ROTC would help him achieve that.
But all that meant right now was that his father and his siblings most likely figured he was doing something for ROTC so they wouldn't be worried about him at all.
Suddenly, Delvante felt the movement of the chamber accelerate.
Then he heard a loud noise.
His whole body shook and he felt a burst of heat on his face.
Delvante raised his hands to protect his head, but it was no use.
A loud roar shook the chamber and seemed to envelop his whole body, and all he could do was squeeze his eyes shut as he began to fall forward.
Later that same night, six female college students paced frantically back and forth in the middle of a tree-lined road in the Boston suburb of Milton, Massachusetts.
They were all shouting and crying and staring at something in the middle of the road.
The object was lit up by the headlights of a black Jeep one of the students had been driving, which was now parked behind them.
One of the students kept repeating that they needed to do something fast, while one of the others screamed at her to stop talking.
Then they heard another car coming down the road.
One of the students took off, disappearing into the darkness, but the others just froze.
The approaching car stopped behind the jeep, and a man got out and asked if they were okay.
For a second, nobody replied.
Then one of the students lowered her head and pointed towards the middle of the road behind her.
The man walked past her and the parked jeep and looked down at the ground and he immediately felt sick to his stomach.
Detective Lewis Bullard of the Milton Police drove towards the stretch of road where the students with the jeep had gathered and the man had stopped.
Bullard could see the flashing blue and red lights of police cars and ambulances ahead of him, illuminating the expensive homes that lined the street.
He had been surprised when he got a frantic call from dispatch telling him to get to this part of town.
This affluent neighborhood almost never saw police activity.
The only time Bullard really ever came out this way was when neighbors called to report high schoolers and college students for smoking pot and drinking in the secluded hangout spot the kids called the Batcave.
But the dispatcher had made it clear that this 911 call was about something way bigger than marijuana.
Bullard parked his car on the road and stepped outside.
He was young, with a shaved head, and he was built like a football player.
He saw a couple of officers standing with five young women and a man on the side of the road.
And a few feet away from them, in the middle of the road, near a black Jeep, he saw his partner, Lieutenant Bill West.
Bullard turned on his flashlight and jogged over towards the Jeep.
Lieutenant West turned to him with a dazed look on his face.
Bullard shined his flashlight on the ground and saw right away why West was so shocked.
Because there, on the pavement, lay the body of a mutilated teenage boy.
It seemed clear to both Bullard and West that the boy had been murdered, but the trauma inflicted on him was so brutal that they couldn't begin to imagine how he had been killed.
The boy's torso was scraped and badly bruised, his face was mangled almost beyond recognition, and his legs were obviously broken.
He had no shirt on, and his jeans had been almost completely shredded.
The detectives slipped on their gloves, crouched down, and began digging through the teenagers' jean pockets, looking for a wallet or a license, but they didn't find anything.
Then, something on the road glinted in Bullard's flashlight.
He leaned down further and saw several small pieces of plastic near the teenagers' legs.
He gestured to his partner to come look, and the two investigators stared at the plastic for several minutes.
The pieces looked like they all came from the same object, but it was like this bizarre jigsaw puzzle so they couldn't tell what the object was.
Bullard suggested it might be a credit card that had been cut up, but even as he said it out loud, he knew it didn't make any sense.
Why would a killer cut up a credit card into a bunch of tiny pieces and then leave the pieces behind as potential clues?
Regardless, they bagged up the plastic pieces as evidence to send to the crime lab for analysis.
The detectives did a thorough search of the scene and then took another look at the young man's body to make sure they hadn't missed anything.
And when they looked this time, they did notice something.
They saw there were thick road burns on the young man's legs and side.
And those burns, along with the other massive injuries they were seeing, helped the detectives form an initial theory.
This young man must have been run over by a car and then dragged down the street.
Detective Bullard stood up and walked over to the college students who had been found pacing around the body.
These five young women were his primary suspects at the moment.
After all, they believed this boy had been run over and dragged to death and the Jeep the students were driving had been parked only feet from the body.
When Bullard introduced himself and asked them what happened, the students all started talking at once.
They began telling him about this party they were going to when they saw something in the road.
They said they got out and that's when they found the body.
And that was it.
They said it was just one big coincidence.
Detective Bullard nodded, but he remained skeptical.
When they finally stopped talking, he asked for just one of them to explain why, if they really had just stumbled onto the teenager's body and were not involved in his death at all,
Well, why had they not immediately called 911?
They were adults with cell phones.
Why did the man who pulled up behind them find them shouting at each other on the road instead of trying to get help?
And after he said this, the students all got quiet.
Finally, the driver of the Jeep mumbled that they were just too freaked out to do anything.
Bullard kept nodding, but he didn't really believe her.
His voice got sharper, and he asked if any of them knew the victim.
After all, the boy looked like he was about their age.
They all shook their heads, but Bullard noticed that none of them were looking him in the eye.
Bullard told the women to wait there, and then he stepped away to join Lieutenant West, who was standing by the Jeep that the students had been driving.
But before Bullard could tell West that he thought these students were holding back information, West knelt down next to the Jeep and motioned for Bullard to do the same.
Then West flashed his light onto the Jeep's undercarriage.
And there Bullard could clearly see blood and brain matter on the bottom of the car that the students had been driving.
Now it really felt like they were getting somewhere.
At this point the detectives felt like you know, these kids very likely had something to do with this teenage boy's death.
However, they were not ready to make an arrest yet.
The next step was just to have the accident reconstruction team run some tests, but also keep an eye on these students because they could become suspects down the road.
Detective Bullard stood up and walked back over to the students.
He told them he was impounding their vehicle.
He then arranged for an officer to take them back to their college campus nearby and he told them not to leave town.
Later that night, after the body had been removed from the scene and taken to the medical examiner, detectives Bullard and West went door to door in the neighborhood asking if anybody had seen or heard something strange that night.
And a few houses.
Into their search, the detectives met two young guys who said that earlier that night, before any of the commotion began, they had been working on a car in the driveway when they heard this loud bang.
They'd both looked around, but the street looked exactly like it always did, except that an unfamiliar car had just pulled up and parked.
So they just figured the car had backfired, and that was the sound they heard.
So they finished up their work in the driveway, went back into the house and didn't think anything about it.
It wasn't until at least a half hour later that they heard shouting in the street and police started showing up.
For a second, Bullard and West were excited.
Maybe the car they saw on the street was the black Jeep the students had been driving and the bang they heard was the sound of the Jeep impacting the boy.
But when they asked the men what kind of car it was, they both said it was an Audi.
The detectives pressed, asking if it could have been possible that it was a black Jeep instead, but the men just laughed.
Mistaking an Audi for a Jeep was not something they would do.
Plus, the Audi was white, not black.
As the detectives walked away from the men, they exchanged a look.
They weren't quite sure what to make of this report of the white Audi.
It certainly did not prove their theory that the college students in the black Jeep hit their victim.
However, it didn't disprove it either.
Still, Bullard quickly issued a BOLO for the white Audi, which is a be on the lookout order that goes to police and media in the area.
Bullard had no idea if anything would come from it.
It was entirely possible that the Audi had nothing to do with the dead boy on the road.
But the following morning, after the local news had run a story on the white Audi, Detective Bullard got a call at his desk.
And when he answered, he heard the driver of the black Jeep from the night before.
And in a shaking voice, she told Bullard that she and her friends had lied to him.
A few hours later, Detectives West and Bullard sat down with the driver of the Jeep inside of an interview room at the police station.
Bullard had a serious look on his face, but he didn't want to scare the driver into clamming up.
So when he spoke, he spoke in a calm, almost soothing voice.
He asked the driver to tell him what really happened.
When the driver began to speak, she couldn't look Bullard in the eye.
She said that they had not really just stumbled onto the body like they had claimed.
Instead, they had all been hanging out at their dorm when another friend of theirs had called.
And the first thing this friend had said was, do you guys want to go see a dead body?
The driver couldn't explain to Bullard why she and the others had raced out to go see it.
Maybe they were bored, or maybe it was just morbid curiosity.
But as she spoke, she wiped tears from her eyes.
She said that when they all got out to the body in the middle of the road, the friend who had called them about the body was standing there waiting for them.
And as soon as the group saw the body, somebody shouted that they needed to call 911, but the other friend who had called them panicked.
This other friend had been getting high at a nearby spot known as the Bat Cave and at the mention of 911 she began to worry that the cops were going to bust her.
So she ran off, got into her white Audi, and drove away.
And shortly after that is when the man pulled up behind them, got out of his car, and he called 911.
Bullard and West just stared at this young woman.
On one hand, she did seem genuine.
After all, she had called them, and she was admitting openly to some pretty reprehensible behavior.
But on the other hand, her story didn't explain the blood and brain they had found on the bottom of her Jeep.
Still, the detectives had to wait for results from tests the forensics team was running on the Jeep before they could know for sure if the Jeep and the young woman sitting in front of them had actually hit the victim.
So Wes just told the driver that if this really is your true story, then we need to speak to the owner of that white Audi.
In a trembling voice, the young woman then told them where they could find her friend.
About an hour later at an apartment complex in town, Bullard and West, crouched in front of the white Audi, looking in confusion at the undercarriage.
Just like the black Jeep, there was blood spattered all over the bottom of the Audi.
But this did not feel like a breakthrough.
It actually didn't make any sense.
Did this mean both cars had driven over the body?
They quickly found the Audi's owner inside of one of the apartments.
They told her they were impounding her car and then brought her to the station to question her.
But she told them the same story as the driver of the Jeep, that she'd gone to see the body and then, in a panic, driven away when she realized the cops were coming.
Bullard and West needed to figure out who was lying.
And so really, they desperately needed the results from the forensics tests.
And the following day, those results came in. and the detectives got two huge pieces of news.
First, an accident reconstruction specialist said that, based on his tests, neither the Jeep nor the Audi had actually hit the teenage boy.
Instead, the boy's body had been so badly mangled that his blood and brain tissue had basically been spread all across the street.
The Jeep and the Audi had simply driven through it and their wheels splashed it onto their undercarriages.
This meant that the students had been telling the truth.
They did not hit the dead boy.
They really had just gone to see his body and freaked out.
But this was not the biggest break of the day, because the second piece of news they got came from the medical examiner.
He told them that he couldn't determine the cause of death because the boy's body was too badly damaged.
However, he said he had found something the detectives had missed.
Crumpled up deep in one of the boys' pockets was a hall pass, like something a high school student would use to leave class and go to the bathroom.
And scrawled in cursive at the top of the hall pass was a name, Delvonte Tisdale.
And so now, even though their initial theory seemed to be falling apart, the detectives suddenly had their first truly solid lead.
Their victim, who now had a name, was a high schooler.
So over the next several days, with the help from multiple police departments, Bullard and West, contacted high schools throughout Massachusetts and the nearby state of Rhode Island.
But not one school had a record of a Delvonte Tisdale.
It was like this kid didn't exist.
And so Bullard and West began to wonder if maybe Delvonte didn't go to school in the area.
Maybe he was just in town visiting someone.
If that was the case, he could be from any high school anywhere.
So police put out a call to major media markets across the country asking anyone for information on this young man.
And it didn't take long before Bullard got a call from a police officer.
This officer had been working a missing persons case for a couple of days, looking for a 16-year-old boy named Delvonte Tisdale.
However, this Delvonte Tisdale lived almost a thousand miles away in Charlotte, North Carolina.
But the timing between when the Delvante in North Carolina went missing and when the Delvante in Massachusetts was discovered made no sense.
The Charlotte police officer said the Delvante Tisdale he and his team were looking for had been seen in Charlotte on the same day that Bullard and West later found the body in Milton Massachusetts.
If this was the case, and if this really was the same Delvante, he would have had to travel almost a thousand miles and been killed and dumped in the span of maybe 12 hours.
It just seemed impossible.
And so the investigators all began to wonder if this was just a very strange coincidence and there really were two Delvante Tisdales.
But when they compared the fingerprints of the body in Massachusetts and the missing boy in North Carolina, they found that they matched.
About a week after Delvante's body had been discovered, detectives Bullard and West flew from Massachusetts to North Carolina.
And along with local police, they met Delvante's family at their house.
And just like the police, Delvante's family could not believe what they were hearing.
How could Delvante have died almost a thousand miles away from home?
Delvante's father and brother said they did not have any connections in Milton or in Boston.
And on top of that, they said Delvante was like the perfect kid.
He did great in school and he was a respected member of the ROTC.
Nobody wanted to hurt him.
Investigators asked the family if they remembered what Delvante was wearing the last time they saw him.
Because when Delvante was found, all he had on were jeans and they were all torn up.
And so police thought if they could find his missing clothing, it might lead them to whoever had done this.
Delvante's brother said he'd seen him wearing jeans, a red shirt, and Nike tennis shoes.
As West continued talking to Delvante's dad and brother and writing everything they said down, Bullard decided to go search Delvante's room to see if he could find anything else that might help.
And as he walked down the hallway, he heard footsteps behind him.
When he turned, he saw Delvante's younger sister.
Bullard was about to ask if the girl was okay when she spoke.
In a quiet, trembling voice, she said her father was not telling the whole story.
Bullard could clearly see the girl was nervous, so he assured her that he was there to help and that she could tell him anything she knew.
That night, Bullard and West flew back home and started trying to piece together what they had learned in Charlotte and what Delvante's younger sister had told Bullard.
It would turn out, at least according to Delvante's younger sister, that their father was really strict with Delvante and for some reason their father really hated Delvante being a part of the ROTC.
And so Delvante's sister believed there was a good chance that Delvante had run away from home because of this, and that he very likely wanted to go live with their mother in Baltimore, Maryland.
Now, the detectives thought this potential conflict with his father could definitely have given Delvante a reason for wanting to run away to his mom's house.
But it didn't solve the bigger mystery, which was how or why Delvante could have ended up dead in the middle of a road in Massachusetts so soon after he'd been seen in North Carolina.
And when the detectives reached out to Delvante's mom, she had no idea if the story about Delvante leaving his house to come possibly see her was even true.
This revelation, and really everything surrounding this investigation, frustrated West and Bullard.
On the night they had found the body and then met the college students in the street.
This had felt like a relatively straightforward case.
And that was even before they knew who their victim was.
Now they had way more information, but none of it fit together and they had no suspects at all.
And so they went back and reviewed statements from the college girls and Delvante's family, and they also combed through the autopsy report, looking for anything that could possibly point them in the right direction.
When they didn't find anything new that jumped out at them, they headed back to the street where Delvante had been found.
They searched the neighborhood again and the woods that surrounded the area.
They even checked out the Bat Cave, the popular drinking and smoking spot.
But they found nothing at all that gave them any ideas about what might have happened to Delvante, which left them almost exactly where they'd been on the first night of the investigation.
All they had for evidence was a badly mangled body, a bunch of tiny broken pieces of plastic they'd found in the road next to the body, and a missing red shirt and a missing pair of Nike tennis shoes.
And so feeling totally frustrated at this point.
Detectives Bullard and West just did a Google Earth search of the entire area around the Milton neighborhood.
They hoped that maybe this way they would find some hidden secret route that could have led Delvante to this street on the night of his death.
And amazingly, as they looked at some of these images online, the detectives both began thinking the same thing.
There was one possible hidden route that would explain how Delvante ended up in that street without anybody seeing him, but it was so insane that it bordered on impossible.
And they were almost embarrassed to say the theory out loud.
In fact, this theory was so convoluted and improbable that they decided, before they could say anything about it publicly, they needed to search one very specific area they'd seen in the Google Earth images to look for very specific pieces of evidence.
If they didn't find this evidence there, they would never publicize this theory.
But if they did find the evidence, they could actually crack the case.
A little more than two weeks later.
So, in December of 2010, two investigators, sent by Bullard and West, walked through the dense woods of the Blue Hills Reservation, which was a forest a couple of miles from where Delvante's body had been found.
Both of these investigators felt like they were on a wild goose chase, but an assignment was an assignment, so they did as they were told and walked slowly and methodically through the underbrush with their eyes glued to the ground.
And after hours of fruitless searching, one of the officers suddenly stopped cold and pointed to something just a few feet away from them.
The two officers looked at each other like they couldn't believe this trip deep into the woods might actually pay off.
They took a few steps closer to the object and there on the ground, was the evidence they had been sent out to find.
They quickly bagged the evidence, hiked out of the woods and headed right to the Milton Police Department.
Detectives Bullard and West took one look at what these other investigators had found, and they both felt this huge rush of adrenaline.
This was the exact evidence they had been looking for in the exact spot they hoped it would be.
Which meant their crazy theory had just solved the case.
Back on the night of November 15th 2010, when detectives Bullard and West were called to the scene and they saw Delvante's body on the road and a group of young women arguing with each other around a parked Jeep.
They believed they had several strong suspects and a pile of evidence in this murder case.
And, it would turn out, all of the evidence they had found at the scene, as well as throughout the investigation, did lead them to crack the case.
But after Bullard and West visited North Carolina and then came back home to piece together all of their evidence, they came to realize that Delvante's final night alive just did not play out like they had first suspected, because the evidence didn't mean what they thought it did.
Those small pieces of broken plastic that Bullard found around Delvante's body were not from a credit card.
They were from a pass for a shuttle bus in North Carolina.
The loud bang that the two guys had heard while working in their driveway was not the sound of the white Audi backfiring.
Instead, it was the sound of something very heavy slamming against the road at a very high speed.
And Delvante's clothing was the key to the whole thing, because Delvante's missing red shirt and Nike tennis shoes were the evidence that those investigators were searching for out in Blue Hills.
And when they found them, Bullard and West realized their crazy theory was correct.
Because once the detectives had come back from North Carolina, they could only come up with one way Delvante could have been in both states in such a short period of time.
He must have flown.
But taking a flight did not explain how he ended up dead in the middle of some random residential street.
And that's when they came up with their new theory.
They did their Google Earth search and realized the street where they found Delvante happened to be directly beneath the flight path that airplanes take when flying into Boston Logan Airport.
And so, with the help from other law enforcement agencies, they expanded their search all along this flight path.
And that included the forest of Blue Hills where Delvante's clothes were found.
It would turn out that on the day Delvante was found dead, Delvante did run away from home in Charlotte, North Carolina.
But he didn't try to get a ride to his mom's house in Baltimore or to any other friend or family member's house.
Instead, he used a shuttle service from a hotel to get to the Charlotte airport.
There, he crept through a damaged spot in the fence around the tarmac and climbed into the wheel.
Well, of an airplane, a plane that happened to be flying to Boston later that night.
The wheel well, was a dark, tight space about the size of the trunk of an average car, maybe a bit smaller, and it was filled with electrical equipment.
And Delvante, once inside, just sat and waited for the plane to take off.
But Delvante didn't realize that flying in a plane not in the cabin, for example, like in the wheel well, where people are not supposed to be is violent and extremely dangerous.
And so, when the plane he had smuggled himself into began speeding down the runway, Delvante would have been pressed up against a metal wall inside of the space, almost to the point of being crushed.
And when the plane actually took off and left the ground and the landing gear retracted into the wheel well, it would have caused an intense amount of heat in that space.
And then as the plane climbed higher and higher, oxygen levels would have dropped significantly.
Delvante would have struggled to breathe and eventually passed out.
He very likely would have died fairly early on in the flight.
However, his body would have remained stuck in the wheel well behind the landing gear, until about two hours later, when the plane began its descent into Boston.
When the landing gear lowered, when the plane was somewhere over Milton Massachusetts, Delvante's dead body came tumbling out and fell 1500 feet through the air.
The loud bang sound.
The two young guys in Milton heard that they thought was the sound of the Audi backfiring.
That wasn't.
That was the sound of Delvante's body hitting the pavement.
The discovery of what really happened to Delvante left his family heartbroken and totally confused.
They just couldn't understand how a teenage boy was able to sneak onto the runway of a major airport, climb into a plane's wheel well without airport security noticing.
Eventually, the family would sue the city of Charlotte for damages.
However, the case was dismissed.
And so, despite movies and TV shows sometimes portraying people stowing away inside of a plane's wheel well, and surviving the flight, the Delvante Tisdell story is proof that you can't.
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.
The Mr Ballin Podcast Strange Dark and Mysterious Stories is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr Ballin.
Our head of writing is Evan Allen.
Our head of production is Zach Levitt.
Produced by Jeremy Bone.
Research and fact-checking by Shelley Hsu, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway and Camille Callahan.
Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Ear.
Audio editing and post-produced by Whit Lacascio, Jordan Stidham, and Cole Lacascio.
Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain.
Production coordination by Samantha Collins.
Production support by Antonio Minata and Delaina Corley.
Artwork by Jessica Clogsden-Kiner.
Theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugden.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin podcast.
If you enjoyed today's story and you wanna hear more like it, go ahead and check out our YouTube channel, just called Mr Ballin, where we have hundreds more stories, a lot like this one, but most of them are not available on this podcast.
They're only available on that YouTube channel, which again is just called Mr. Ballin.
So that's gonna do it.
I really appreciate your support.
Until next time, see ya.
