Hey, Prime members, you can binge eight new episodes of the Mr. Ballin podcast one month early and all episodes ad-free on Amazon Music.
Download the Amazon Music app today. On a Monday afternoon in December of 2001, a pair of police officers walked in the side door of a big old farmhouse in the woods in Loudoun County, Virginia.
They had just received a frantic 911 call from a man who said he had found his neighbor horrifically injured on the kitchen floor.
The police officers crept through the house, peering cautiously around corners in case the attacker was still in the house.
But other than the sound of their footsteps creaking on the hardwood, the home was totally silent.
When they made it to the kitchen, they stopped.
There, lying on his stomach, was the body of an older man, covered in blood.
One of the officers stepped forward and knelt down to check the man's pulse, but it was obvious to both of them that he was dead.
The officer was about to stand back up when something strange on the back of the man's neck caught his eye.
Slowly, the officer reached out a hand and pulled down the collar of the man's shirt.
When he saw what was there, he looked back at his partner with an expression of fear, because what he had just discovered could be a sign that there were devil-worshiping occultists prowling their rural community.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, please take the follow button on a camping trip and leave them way off the hiking trail before setting up camp for the night.
After dark, once the follow button has gone to sleep, secretly pack up all of your gear and leave the follow button completely alone in the middle of nowhere.
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On the evening of December 8, 2001, 57-year-old Dr. Robert Schwartz stood in the kitchen of his farmhouse outside of Leesburg, Virginia, stirring strips of pork and vegetables in his frying pan.
Robert could hear the rain beating against the windows, and the sound made him feel at peace.
He had the heat cranked up, and he was wearing his most comfortable sweatpants.
There was nowhere he would rather be on a rainy winter night than inside this home, which had been in his wife's family for generations.
He checked the pork, which was almost done, and he reached for a single plate out of the cabinet.
Robert used to love cooking, and until just a few years ago, he always made big portions to feed his family of five.
But his wife had died four years earlier from cancer, and her death had sent all three of their kids spiraling, especially their youngest, Clara, who was only 15 at the time.
Clara was the one who actually found her mom on the morning she died, and she had fallen into a deep depression afterwards.
Robert had been worried he might never pull her out.
But recently, Clara seemed to have gotten into a really good groove.
She was 19 now, and she'd found a tight-knit group of friends who all loved Renaissance fairs, where people dress up like they're from medieval times.
Clara had created a fantasy game called Underworld, and the kids all spent a lot of time playing it.
Robert didn't really understand the game, but he was thrilled that Clara had finally discovered something to be passionate about.
These days, Clara was away at college, along with her older sister, Michelle, and her older brother, Jesse.
And Robert was proud of how he had pulled the kids through their mother's death.
He felt like he had sent them out into the world as basically happy and capable people, which was a goal that had seemed very far away in the early period of their grief.
He did miss them, though. Most nights now, he ate alone, with the creaking of the old house to keep him company.
His kids had always complained about all the noises the house made, but Robert liked it.
He spent his days working long hours as a biophysicist studying DNA at a science and technology firm called the Center for Innovative Technology, where the offices and laboratories were white and brightly lit and pretty quiet.
Robert loved his work, but the environment was a little sterile for his taste.
So, coming home to an overgrown farmhouse way out in the woods, where vines grew up the stone walls and the floorboards squeaked and the nearest neighbors were more than a quarter mile away, was a nice contrast.
Now, he set his plate down and reached into a bag of tortillas on the counter.
He put two in the middle of the plate, and then he started to tip the frying pan to scoop out the meat and vegetables on top.
But before he could turn off the burner and head to the table, he heard a knock coming from the front door.
Robert frowned and craned his neck to look toward the door, which had a little window in it, but the rain made it impossible to see out.
Robert did not get a lot of unexpected visitors, especially not on a stormy night like this, but he figured maybe it was just a delivery driver trying to keep a package from getting soaked.
But whoever it was knocked again, and so Robert turned and walked out of the kitchen and through the front room toward the entryway.
The knocking had gotten fast and loud by the time Robert made it to the front door, flipped the lock, and swung the door open.
Two days later, on December 10th, 2001, at around 1.15 on Monday afternoon, a man named Sam Welsh, who lived down the street from Robert Schwartz, was loading laundry into his washing machine when his phone rang.
Sam abandoned the laundry and walked into his kitchen to pick it up.
When he said hello, he heard the voice of a friend, and his friend sounded pretty anxious.
This friend worked at the Center for Innovative Technology, which is where Robert worked, and the friend said that Robert hadn't come into work today.
He had missed an important meeting, and he wasn't answering his phone.
And this was about as out of character as it was possible to get for Robert, who was famous in the field of DNA research and had actually worked on the first online database of DNA sequence information.
Robert was organized, reliable, and extremely communicative.
He never just went silent. So this friend asked Sam, can you please go to Robert's house to check to see if he's okay?
Sam didn't hesitate. He said, of course he would.
Then he hung up the phone, went out to his truck, and drove to Robert's farmhouse, which was about a mile away at the end of a dead-end road.
When Sam pulled up, he saw Robert's car parked on the street and a construction crew digging up Robert's driveway in front of the house.
Everything looked calm and normal, which Sam found encouraging.
He recognized one of the workers as another neighbor of his, so he parked his truck, hopped out, and went over to ask if the worker had seen Robert.
But the worker said no. The construction crew had arrived almost six hours earlier, at 7.30 that morning, and not only had Robert not come out to greet them all like he normally did, they hadn't actually seen any movement at all inside of his house.
Now, the brief sense of relief Sam had felt when he arrived evaporated.
He explained to the construction worker about the concerning call he'd just gotten, and so he asked the worker to come with him to go check on Robert.
The two men walked down the driveway toward the farmhouse.
They knocked on the front door, but nobody answered.
So they went around to the side door, which Sam knew Robert usually left unlocked.
Sam didn't want to just barge in, so when they got to the side door, he first knocked loudly.
But again, nobody answered. Sam shot a worried look at the construction worker, and then he tried the knob.
And just like he'd expected, the door was unlocked.
Sam stepped inside and called out Robert's name, but the house was completely silent.
So, he took a few halting steps. Ahead of him, he could see the kitchen.
Sam called out Robert's name again and took one more step forward, right up to the threshold of the kitchen, and then he froze.
For a long second, Sam stood there completely still, not even breathing, with the construction worker a few paces behind him.
Then, Sam whirled around and gave the worker a shove back towards the door.
Sam was so afraid that he could barely think, but he managed to shout one single sentence.
"'Call the police!' Loudoun County investigator Greg Locke was sitting in a classroom in a local school near Leesburg, Virginia, halfway through his first day of a week-long police training course when his pager vibrated.
And when Locke looked down at the short message blinking on his little screen, he felt his heart start to race.
He stood up and gathered his things, told the instructor he was sorry but he had to go, then speedwalked out of the classroom.
Locke had only been with the Loudoun County Sheriff's Department for a couple of months.
He had originally planned on becoming a firefighter, but training for that position had required that he go to the local police academy.
And in the police academy, Locke had realized that he actually preferred the slow, puzzle-solving nature of detective work over the fast-paced intensity of firefighting.
So he had switched careers entirely and joined the Sheriff's Department.
He started off in the crime lab, but he'd just transferred to the homicide unit, which was actually why he was taking this class.
Now, Investigator Locke pushed open the front door of the school building where his class was happening and jogged the rest of the distance to his cruiser.
He got in, turned the ignition, and peeled out of the parking lot, headed west toward the big old farmhouse in the woods.
When Locke pulled up on the dead-end street, he saw the flashing blue and white lights of a sea of police cruisers.
It looked like the entire sheriff's department was there.
Locke got out of his cruiser and walked down the long driveway and up the front steps of the farmhouse.
The front door was open, and as Locke stepped through the entryway, he could tell that the scene was pretty well covered by police and crime scene techs.
So he looked for a supervisor to get a rundown of exactly what they were dealing with.
Locke found a supervisor standing just outside the kitchen, staring grimly at a man's bloody body.
At first glance, it was immediately clear to Locke that whatever had happened here to this man, it had been a frenzy of violence.
The man's body lay face down on the floor, his clothing had been shredded in the attack, and there was so much blood that it had dried in sticky thick pools that spread out all over the hardwood.
Even the bottom of the man's white socks were bloody, which Locke knew meant there must have been a struggle because the only way for the bottom of his socks to get that soaked was if he had been bleeding heavily and then stepped in it.
Locke's supervisor turned away from the body and brought Locke quickly up to speed.
Their victim was Dr. Robert Schwartz, who was a well-known biophysicist, and he had been stabbed to death.
It didn't appear to be a robbery because nothing had been stolen or rifled through, and there was no sign of forced entry, which meant that, very likely, Robert had opened the door to his attacker willingly.
Locke knew that a set of facts like this often meant that a murder victim had been targeted by a person they knew, rather than attacked by a random stranger.
And the savagery of the stabbing itself supported that theory, because it suggested a highly emotional killer who felt true rage towards the victim.
But Locke's supervisor told him there was one more thing, something incredibly bizarre.
Whoever had stabbed Dr. Schwartz to death had also carved an X into the back of his neck.
Locke told his supervisor that he was going to start canvassing the neighborhood, and his supervisor nodded in agreement.
As Locke walked back out the front door of the farmhouse, he looked around and shook his head incredulously.
This was a beautiful area. It was up in the mountains, and it was sitting right above a historic little downtown district with nice restaurants and breweries and coffee shops and a vibrant art scene.
It was very hard to imagine any murder taking place here, let alone some kind of ritual killing that involved a vicious knife attack and a symbol carved into the victim's skin.
The nearest house was way down the road, and as Locke reached it and climbed the front steps, he realized he couldn't even see Robert's home from here.
This gave him a sinking feeling. He was afraid that the people inside of this house could not have possibly heard anything going on inside of Robert's house a quarter mile away.
None of the neighbors could have. But Locke knocked anyway, and soon a middle-aged married couple answered looking concerned.
They said they had seen all the commotion and they asked if everything was okay.
Inspector Locke just shook his head and said, no, there had been an incident, but he couldn't say anything about it right now.
Locke told the couple that what he had come for was to ask if they had seen or heard anything suspicious over the weekend.
He watched as the couple exchanged a look.
Yes, the husband said, as a matter of fact, they did.
On Saturday night, during the rainstorm, a soaking wet teenage boy had come to their house asking to use the phone because his car got stuck in the mud a little ways down the road.
The husband said he had looked outside and seen the car, which had a young woman and man inside, and then he said he called a towing company that he knew, and the teenager had thanked him and gone back to the car to wait, and the tow truck driver had arrived not long after.
Locke scribbled this down in his notepad, then asked the husband what exactly was strange about the encounter.
It wasn't uncommon at all in an area this rural for cars to get stuck.
The husband nodded in agreement, but it wasn't the car getting stuck that was strange, he said.
It was where the car was driving in the first place.
The teenagers had gotten stuck on a dead-end road.
There was literally nothing down there, except for Robert Schwartz's house.
So, the husband asked, what were the teenagers doing down there?
Locke left the neighbor's home and checked in by phone with his supervisor to share what he'd just heard about the kids in the mud on Saturday night.
And his supervisor was instantly interested because the medical examiner had just come and collected the body and his initial examination suggested that the murder had happened on Saturday night too. and Locke's supervisor told him that the medical examiner had also discovered something else that was pretty unusual.
When he had rolled Robert's body over, he found deep marks in the wood underneath where he had been laying.
This was important because it looked like the marks had been made by the knife used to kill Robert.
In other words, this could not have just been a regular knife, like you would find in a regular kitchen.
Instead, the knife the killer had used had such a long blade that when the killer plunged it into Robert's torso, it had gone all the way through his body and then into the floor beneath him, leaving the marks.
That meant the murder weapon had a blade that was at least two feet long.
Now, the murder weapon had not been found inside of the home, so it looked like the killer had brought the long blade with them to the house and then taken it with them when they left.
To Locke and his supervisor, the idea of the murder weapon being this long, strange blade only strengthened their fear that this murder might have a ritualistic or even satanic element to it.
But Locke told his supervisor that before they went down a rabbit hole of the occult, they should focus on something a bit simpler that was right in front of their faces.
They should track down those teenagers and the tow truck driver.
Hey, it's Mr. Ballin. For the first time, my show, Medical Mysteries, has joined forces with Redacted for a special episode.
A Redacted Medical Mystery uncovers how routine surgery leads to classified government operations.
Listen now on the Medical Mysteries or Redacted feeds, or search A Redacted Medical Mystery wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey listeners, Mr. Ballin here. What if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest, and most mysterious stories happening right now are all connected to what might be the biggest crime of our generation?
You know I'm always on the hunt for the most chilling and perplexing tales out there.
Well, I've discovered a new podcast that uncovers real-world mysteries unfolding right now. much like how another Ballin' Studios podcast, redacted Declassified Mysteries, brings hidden government secrets to light.
And it's called Lawless Planet. Host Zach Goldbaum reveals how shocking tales of murder, cover-ups, and mysterious deaths are all part of something bigger. the systematic destruction of our planet.
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Hey, it's Mr. Ballin. I'm excited to tell you about something special.
For the first time, My show, Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, has joined forces with Redacted, Declassified Mysteries with Luke LaManna, to tell a story so complex it required our combined storytelling styles.
This special episode is called A Redacted Medical Mystery.
In it, unexplained symptoms after a routine surgery quickly unravel into something much darker, leading straight to classified government operations hidden for decades.
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If you're fascinated by unexplained medical stories, well, stick around on Medical Mysteries.
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Locke got in his cruiser and drove to the office of the towing company, where he found the owner in the lobby.
Locke asked him if he remembered a call on Saturday night about a carload of teenagers stuck in the mud on a dead-end street.
As soon as the owner heard this, he scowled.
"'Yeah,' he said. "'I remember. "'Those kids stiffed my driver on the bill.'"
And now, Locke felt a surge of adrenaline.
This was the second suspicious thing he learned about the kids in the stuck car.
Not only were they driving down a dead-end road they had no business being on, but they'd ducked out on the towing bill.
Now, stiffing the driver was a crime, but Locke wondered if they had done it because they wanted to avoid giving out their real names.
Locke asked the owner if he could speak to the driver, and the owner said sure, then disappeared into the back office.
A few minutes later, a man in a t-shirt with the towing company's logo on it walked out into the lobby and said he was the one who helped those kids.
Locke could see from the man's furrowed brow and darting eyes that he was nervous, like he had something sensitive or upsetting to say, and Locke wondered if he was about to break this case open right here, right now.
The tow truck driver gestured to Locke to follow him to the far corner of the lobby furthest away from the back office where his boss was.
When they got there, well out of earshot of the boss, the driver started to mumble something about how he'd gone out in the rain and unstuck the car and the kids jumped in and took off without paying.
But then he stopped and looked around like he was making sure they were alone.
Once he was satisfied they had real privacy, the driver leaned into lock and said, "'I'll tell you something, but you can't tell my boss.'"
Locke quickly nodded yes, completely desperate for the driver to continue.
Whatever he was about to say, Locke wanted to hear it.
Well, the tow truck driver said slowly, I lied.
The tow truck driver explained that the kids did not stiff him on the bill.
In fact, they were perfectly nice and polite, and they didn't seem upset in any way, and they had gone to an ATM to get cash to pay the bill.
The driver had decided to lie about the kids running off just so he could pocket the cash.
And at this, Locke felt himself deflate.
He could see his theory of teenagers driving around committing crimes and trying to hide their identities slipping away.
Locke suppressed an urge to roll his eyes at the tow truck driver and instead promised he wouldn't say anything to the man's boss.
He asked if the driver had the kid's names, and the driver said yes.
He kept a log of all his jobs. So he had the driver's name and license number.
He also remembered the bank they went to for the ATM.
Locke scribbled down the information, thanked the tow truck driver, and then went back to headquarters.
Back at his desktop computer, Locke looked up the teenage driver, whose name was Michael Fole.
He was hoping to discover that this kid was some kind of serious criminal, but instead, he saw a skinny 21-year-old college student with no record.
He made a pretty unlikely murder suspect.
Locke leaned back, feeling disappointed.
His hope for a simple explanation for the murder instead of an occult ritual was fading fast.
He checked the time and realized it was now mid-afternoon, and he still hadn't talked to the victim's family yet.
He decided he would finish running down the final details on the kids in the car the next day.
Right now, he had to go find Robert Schwartz's three children and tell them that their father had been murdered.
The drive to James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia took about two hours, and it was dark by the time Locke pulled onto campus.
Both of Robert Schwartz's daughters, his youngest daughter Clara and her older sister Michelle, were students here.
And as Locke parked in front of the residence hall, he saw the campus police officer and the university counselor he had contacted to help with the notification waiting for him.
They led Locke into the residence hall, up a flight of stairs, and down a hallway to Clara's dorm.
The campus police officer knocked and then stepped aside, so Locke could lead the conversation.
The door opened, and Locke saw a young girl in baggy clothes with stringy brown hair and red bloodshot eyes.
It looked like she'd been awake for days, and he suddenly felt for this teenager, whose life he knew he was about to change completely.
He introduced himself and told her he had something important to tell her, but that she should sit down first.
He watched as Clara nervously backed up and then sat on the edge of her bed.
Then, Locke took a deep breath, and in a quiet and steady voice, he told Clara the news.
Her father was dead. For what felt like a very long time, the room was completely silent.
Clara stared blankly at Locke for so long that Locke started to wonder if she'd even understood him.
But right before Locke was about to ask her if she was okay, Clara's eyes seemed to snap back into focus, and she finally spoke.
She asked how did her dad die. And now, Locke hesitated, choosing his words carefully.
He knew he had to be mindful about how much he revealed about the crime, even to the victim's closest family members.
Everyone was a possible suspect until they were ruled out.
So, Locke told Clara that her father had been found dead inside of his home, and what happened to him was a question they were investigating.
Clara went back to staring blankly. Locke could tell Clara was in some kind of shock, and so there was no way he was going to leave her alone.
So he asked her to come with him, because now they had to go and tell her sister, Michelle.
A few minutes later, Locke stood inside of Michelle's dorm room as Michelle screamed the word no over and over again while Clara tried to comfort her.
So far, telling the kids had been just as heart-wrenching as Locke had expected.
Notifications were one of the hardest parts of his job, especially in a murder, because Locke couldn't just comfort them and leave.
Instead, he had to stay and question them, no matter how upset they were.
Locke looked at Michelle and Clara and decided that of the two of them, Clara was in much better shape to be interviewed.
So he asked her to please step out of the room so he could ask her a few questions.
Clara nodded and Locke led her out into the hallway to a quiet corner near the stairwell where it felt like they had some privacy.
He pulled out his notepad and asked Clara when she last talked to her father.
Clara looked down at the floor and shook her head sadly.
Friday, she said. They had talked about her coming home for the holidays in a few weeks.
Then she paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was almost a whisper.
She said that during that last conversation, she and her father had fought.
She had a car, but it was back at the farmhouse, and she wanted to bring it to school, but her dad wouldn't let her.
She looked up at Locke and told him that she didn't know why she had gotten so upset at him.
Her dad had promised to consider it over the holidays, so she didn't even know why she blew up at him.
Now, her final conversation with her father would always be this stupid argument.
Locke watched as Clara dropped her head again.
He felt sorry for this stunned and awkward teenager.
He told Clara he hated to keep pressing, but he needed to know about her father's friends and relationships, and about the people that she and her siblings hung out with.
He asked if anyone they knew might have had some kind of grudge against her father.
At this, Clara screwed up her face in what looked like deep concentration.
Then she slowly listed off the names of some of her dad's closest friends, but said none of them had a grudge.
And most of her friends had either never met her dad, or if they had, they really liked him.
But then, Locke watched as Clara's expression changed.
It looked like she had just remembered something else.
And suddenly, she looked straight at Locke with a focus in her eyes that he hadn't seen until now.
She said one of her friends had recently met her dad over Thanksgiving break, and ever since then, he'd been acting really strange and intense.
She told Locke that his name was Kyle Hulbert, he was 18, and they had met at a Renaissance fair a few months earlier.
They had gotten along really well at first, but over the last several weeks, his whole demeanor had changed, although she didn't know why.
He'd actually gotten busted on a concealed weapons charge for carrying daggers around a shopping mall, and after that, Clara said she had tried to avoid him.
At the mention of daggers, Locke's eyes narrowed.
This murder case involved an unusual blade as the murder weapon.
And while daggers weren't long like the murder weapon, they were an unusual knife to carry, especially at the mall.
Locke's disappointment over the teenagers and the tow truck disappeared as he underlined Kyle Hulbert and daggers in his pad.
This was a good lead. He told Clara they were almost done, and soon she could go back with her sister and they could tell their brother together.
But first, he needed to know the names of Kyle's closest friends.
Clara nodded and started listing off names, which Locke wrote down as quickly as he could.
But when Clara got to the last name, Locke's pencil froze on the page.
Because Locke knew he had heard this name before.
Just a few hours earlier, in fact, when he was standing in the tow truck company lobby.
It was Michael Fole, the teenage driver of the stuck car.
The next day, December 11th, Locke had Michael Fole picked up by police officers when he left his house with his girlfriend in the car.
Officers took both of them to the station, put them in separate rooms, and told them to wait.
Someone would be in to question them soon.
Meanwhile, Locke executed a search warrant at Michael's house. where police seized a desktop computer, two black cloaks, multiple knives, a document about human sacrifice, and a sword with a blade more than two feet long with little flecks of blood still on the metal.
That afternoon, when Locke walked into the interview room where Michael was waiting, he felt like he had a pretty good case.
Now, he just needed Michael to talk. And pretty much the second he sat down, Locke got his wish.
Michael Fole and his girlfriend agreed to tell Locke everything they knew.
But their story was more bizarre and more horrific than Locke or anyone else had expected.
In fact, it was so wild and so shocking that it would take several more weeks of investigation before Locke and the rest of the police were able to fully untangle the sequence of events that Michael Fole and his girlfriend sketched out in their interviews that day.
But finally, on February 1st, 2002, so almost two months after Robert Schwartz's death, the police arrested the mastermind behind the murder.
And it was not who the police had expected it to be.
Based on interviews, evidence, and transcripts from online and phone conversations, the following is what happened to Dr. Robert Schwartz on the night of Saturday, December 8, 2001.
At around 6.15 p.m., the killer sat in the backseat of a car driving down a muddy dead-end road in the woods in a rainstorm.
The killer's friend, Michael Fole, was driving, and Michael's girlfriend was riding in the front passenger seat.
Michael and his girlfriend were both talking because they were trying to find the big old farmhouse that was their destination, but the killer was not paying attention to them.
Instead, the killer was completely focused on a different voice, a voice that no one else could hear.
The voice was named Nicodemus, and Nicodemus was a god.
In fact, Nicodemus was one of six gods that had lived inside the killer's head for as long as the killer could remember.
And now, Nicodemus had a warning. Don't go up there, Nicodemus shouted inside of the killer's head.
Now, usually, the killer listened to Nicodemus.
The killer knew the god was just trying to keep them safe.
But tonight, the killer knew they could not back down from their plan. innocent lives were at stake because the killer knew something that no one else did, and that was that Dr. Robert Schwartz was a monster.
He lashed out with violence even though no one else could see it, and he poisoned lemons and pork with sulfuric acid.
And recently, the killer was absolutely certain that Dr. Robert Schwartz had begun planning a murder of his own. the killer knew they had to strike first.
So, from the backseat of the car, the killer answered Nicodemus, telling the god in a whisper, I have to do this.
The car came to a stop in the mud in front of Robert Schwartz's farmhouse, and the killer got out wearing a long black trench coat that hid a 27-inch long sword.
The killer stalked through the rain up to Robert's front door and started knocking, hard.
After a minute, the killer heard footsteps squeaking on old hardwood inside the house.
And then the door opened. The killer could smell the dinner that Robert was cooking in the kitchen.
Robert stood in the doorway, looking down at the killer in confusion.
"'Yes?' he asked. The killer asked if Clara was home, and Robert said no.
So the killer asked for Clara's phone number, and Robert invited the killer inside out of the rain while he wrote it down."
And this was when the killer decided to strike.
As Robert stood with his back to the killer, writing out his daughter's phone number, the killer told him, I know your plans.
And as Robert turned in confusion, the killer pulled out the sword and began slashing.
Robert tried to protect himself, grabbing for the blade and cutting his hand in the process, spilling blood all over the floor, but the killer was in an unstoppable frenzy.
The killer yanked the sword away from Robert and then slashed his stomach.
Somehow, Robert stayed standing as the killer swung the sword and sprayed blood across the kitchen.
Some of the blood landed in the killer's mouth, and the metallic taste filled the killer with pleasure and adrenaline.
The killer slashed Robert over and over until finally Robert fell, landing face down on the hardwood.
Robert wasn't moving anymore, and Nicodemus was screaming at the killer to stop, but the killer couldn't stop.
Some of Robert's blood had landed on the hot stove where it was now sizzling, and the smell filled the air as the killer rammed the sword all the way through Robert's body over and over again, sinking the tip of the blade into the hardwood beneath Robert.
By the time the killer finished, Robert's clothing was shredded and he had been stabbed more than 30 times.
The killer stood over his victim for a minute and then calmly walked over to the stove to turn off the burner.
And then before he left the house, as a final touch, the killer took the sword and carved an X into the back of Robert's neck.
The killer did this because X was the signature of an assassin in the fantasy game that the killer loved.
That fantasy game was called Underworld.
Underworld had been created by the killer's best friend, and it was the killer's best friend who was the mastermind behind the murder of Robert Schwartz.
In the game of Underworld, the mastermind went by the name High Priestess of Chaos, and the killer was called Assassin.
But in the real world, the killer's name was Kyle Hulbert, and the mastermind's name was Clara Schwartz.
It would turn out Robert Schwartz's daughter, Clara, had never come out of her depression after the death of her mother.
Instead, she sunk deep into misery and also paranoia and became convinced that her father was trying to kill her.
And when Clara met Kyle Hulbert at a Renaissance fair, she found a willing player in her dark fantasy world.
Kyle was schizophrenic and bipolar, and he'd grown up in foster care and mental hospitals, totally unable to tell the difference between reality and the voices and visions inside of his head.
Clara and Kyle, along with Michael Fole and his girlfriend, formed a disturbed little family.
They all played characters in Clara's fantasy game, Underworld, and they referred to each other as brother and sister.
And over time, Clara had convinced all of them that her father was trying to poison her by lacing lemons and pork with chemicals like sulfuric acid, and that he was ultimately planning to murder her.
And so, convinced that Clara was in real danger, Kyle, the underworld assassin, stepped in to protect her.
But what Clara did not say to Kyle was that if her father died, she believed she would inherit several hundred thousand dollars.
And so, at Clara and Kyle's instruction, Michael and his girlfriend drove Kyle to Robert Schwartz's house in the rainstorm on December 8, 2001, so that Kyle could stop Robert once and for all.
And they might have gotten away with their crime if their car had not gotten stuck in the mud.
In the end, Michael Fole was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in the murder.
His girlfriend accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to just one year.
Kyle pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and conspiracy and was sentenced to life in prison.
And although Clara Schwartz tried to pin the whole murder on Kyle by dropping his name and the story about his arrest for carrying daggers to investigator Locke, she was ultimately caught when police read transcripts of her online and phone conversations with Kyle and her other friends. it was clear that Clara herself was the driving force behind the murder of her father.
She was found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy and sentenced to 48 years in prison.
In a final twist, it was the DNA research that Dr. Robert Schwartz himself had spent his career on which helped investigators to determine that the blood on the sword belonged to Robert.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast.
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