[tense music]
♪ ♪
- When I was telling people about these strange things,
I didn't feel like I was going crazy,
But I felt like I sounded like I was crazy.
- They felt like it was escalating.
It was really scary.
- I think I was in denial at first.
- There's no reason I would be missing
My bathing suit bottoms.
I had the tops,
And just the bottoms were missing.
- Oh, my god, a phrogger is watching me sleep.
- When it finally sinks in
That someone entered the home while I was sleeping,
It was terrifying.
- Man found hiding between a family's walls.
- Intruder secretly living inside her attic.
- Man slithers out from under home.
- Make sure your crawl spaces are locked.
- I hear footsteps.
I'm vulnerable, naked, and someone is in my house.
- There was somebody violating my home.
- I want to believe it's in my head.
- It's a giant man's handprint.
- You came into my home. You invaded my privacy.
[woman screams]
- We had a phrogger in our house.
♪ ♪
- I grew up in monett, missouri.
It's a really small town.
There's just a couple little churches.
There's one school.
A very small class size of maybe 30 people.
- Heidi was always independent.
I didn't ever have to really watch over her.
She kept herself entertained.
- If heidi wanted something, heidi was gonna get it,
Or she wasn't gonna do it.
She's very strong-willed.
- I got married really young, and after I got divorced,
I was kind of ready to get out on my own.
So I moved to tulsa, oklahoma.
I was excited to move to tulsa,
To meet people my age, to socialize, to go to school.
- As her mom, I was a little concerned
About it being a bigger town.
We had lived there previously.
- It was only, like, an hour, hour and a half from home,
So it was close to home,
But it was also far enough away
That I had my independence
And I could figure out what I wanted to do.
I had just got a job
Waitressing at a little restaurant,
So now, all of a sudden, I could go out with friends
And meet new people.
I'd just turned 21,
So I was, like, going out to bars for the first time,
Making friends that were my age.
I was young, and I was, like, just starting over,
Starting life.
- Heidi has always dated people that I did not care for.
It seems to be a fatherly kind of thing.
That nobody's good enough for your little girl,
But heidi really tended to bring home the worst.
I mean, just-- she was a jerk magnet.
- My dad's always worried about me.
[chuckles] so, of course he was worried.
But he's always been so supportive of me
And my decisions.
I think he was just proud of me
That I'd made this choice on my own
To go and do this.
I got accepted into ultrasound school.
I found an apartment on the westside of town.
It was a two-story apartment, and they were going to be
Putting me on the second floor, with a balcony.
It felt a little bit safer than a ground floor apartment.
I had my own stairs that go up to my individual door.
It wasn't the greatest neighborhood.
It wasn't the best part of town.
But it was really convenient.
It was right next to the school.
I was comfortable there.
- Heidi had told me where she was moving to,
Which I was familiar with that side of town
From being in tulsa before.
And I was concerned about it.
She described the area.
It was very, very crowded, busy apartment
Where should couldn't find parking a lot of times.
So she would have to walk to her apartment,
Sometimes at night, so I was concerned about that.
I was so concerned I even gave her a bottle of mace
To put on her keychain.
♪ ♪
- One morning, I had school,
So I just get up and get ready to go to school.
And, you know, I'm getting dressed.
And I look for my underwear
And I just notice
There's less pairs than I originally had.
Just here and there, kind of like
When you lose a sock in the dryer.
Just a few pairs were going missing.
I thought it odd, but I just kind of continued on my day.
I didn't make a big ordeal out of it.
It's a little bit frustrating,
But you just move about your day.
♪ ♪
- So, one night, she calls me and tells me
That she's had some underwear missing.
I wasn't that concerned about it at first,
Because she has misplaced things before,
And then she usually finds them.
- I had a friend that had a pool,
And over the summer,
We would have pool parties at her house periodically.
So, I was looking for my swimming suit,
And I couldn't find any swimming suit bottoms.
There's no reason I would be missing
My bathing suit bottoms.
I had the tops, and just the bottoms were missing.
I started telling friends at school
That my underwear are going missing.
And they just laughed.
They thought it was funny, and they would laugh at it.
I didn't think about calling police over something like,
You know, my underwear missing,
Or setting detectives on the missing underwear case.
♪ ♪
I told my mom and my family that this was happening,
And they said,
"are you sitting with your clothes in the laundry?"
Which I don't.
Usually, I'll just go to the laundromat.
And I'll put my clothes in,
I'll go back upstairs, I'll watch a movie.
After about an hour so, I'll go check on them.
And so, they were left unattended,
So I assumed that somebody had to have
Been stealing my underwear out of the laundromat.
♪ ♪
So, the next time I went to the laundromat,
I sat down with my laundry.
And I would just take my laptop
And I'd, you know, do homework or play music
Or movies on my laptop
While I was waiting for my laundry to finish,
So, that way, I made sure whatever I took down there
Came back with me.
The people that I saw coming in and out doing their laundry
Seemed like they were with their kids
And with their family, and nobody looked suspicious.
Nobody looked like they would be an underwear thief.
♪ ♪
It was over several weeks that I was
Taking my laundry down, bringing it back.
And any time I took it down,
I came back, I folded them, I counted the pairs.
Nothing was going missing from that laundromat.
That's about when I thought, since the underwear
Wasn't going missing from the laundromat,
Then it had to have been going missing from my apartment.
♪ ♪
My friends don't have a key. My parents don't have a key.
I don't have people in and out of my apartment.
To me, the only other person
That would have had a key or access to my apartment
Would me maintenance.
So, I go to the apartment management,
And I said, "okay, I know this sounds crazy,
"but I've had underwear missing.
"is there any way that a maintenance guy
Could be coming into my apartment doing that?"
They assured me.
"there's no way
"that our maintenance men would be doing that.
They're not going into your apartment."
- I don't know that that really made me feel much better,
Because as somebody who manages apartments,
I know the maintenance man could go in there
And the management may not know about it.
♪ ♪
- I never had met the maintenance guy,
Saw the maintenance guy.
I had no idea if it even was a guy.
It could have been a girl.
I just kind of assumed
It was whoever had a key in maintenance.
♪ ♪
The underwear missing,
It didn't just happen in a week or two weeks.
It was months of slowly missing my underwear.
I got to the point where I did not have any underwear left.
I went and bought hundreds of dollars of nice underwear
That I replaced them with,
And those started going missing.
I just could not afford to keep buying expensive underwear,
So I got to the point where I just quit wearing underwear,
'cause I was like, whoever is coming in
And stealing them, that'll show them.
They can't steal them anymore if I don't wear them.
♪ ♪
I am very independent, but I think that
I really did want to get a dog to have a companion,
And also for security.
So I went to humane society
And I found this perfect, little dog.
He was about the right size.
♪ ♪
Puck's the name that they already gave him.
And he had been there for several months
And they were about to put him down,
And I kind of feel like I saved him.
- She told me her experience about picking out puck.
And so, I was happy that she would have a companion,
Like, not to be alone, for one thing,
And then also to have something
That would maybe help keep her safe.
♪ ♪
- So, it's about 9:00 or 10:00 at night.
I was in the living room,
Just talking to a friend on the phone,
And puck was in the bedroom
And just started barking like crazy.
[dog barking]
This wasn't just a little bark,
Like a dog hears something outside.
This was like there was something there
That he was barking at.
[dog barking]
One of the reasons that I got him
And he made such a great apartment dog
Was because he just did not bark that often.
He was a very quiet dog.
So, for puck to bark like that at something,
It's very unusual.
I am very, very nervous.
I don't have a weapon or anything,
But I walk to the bedroom
To see what it is that he's barking at.
[dog barking]
I look around the corner,
And I see him standing in the bedroom,
Staring at the closet,
And he is barking ferociously at something in the closet.
♪ ♪
There's obviously something there.
[barking]
I was terrified.
I just got up the courage.
I went, and I didn't even look in the closet.
I grabbed him by his collar,
And I dragged him out of the bedroom,
And I shut the bedroom door.
♪ ♪
After that, I just sat on my couch,
And I was just shaking and upset.
♪ ♪
He had calmed down, and I had calmed down.
And then, I convinced myself
That I'm being absurd and it's nothing
And I slept on the couch that night.
♪ ♪
The next morning,
Whenever I felt like I was calmed down
And it was light out and I felt safer,
I had to get ready for school.
So, I go into my bedroom.
And I look in the closet.
♪ ♪
I don't see anything, and nobody's there.
♪ ♪
I feel like if there was something in that closet,
It would have came out into the living room.
And I feel much safer.
I really became the kind of person that had blinders on.
If everything's safe and I'm safe, then I'm okay.
And just block this out, and you're okay.
Don't make a big deal about every bump
And sound that you hear.
♪ ♪
Every morning, when I would leave for work,
I would make sure my doors were all closed and locked.
And one day, I came home, I walk up my stairs.
My door's definitely locked, and I unlock it.
I walk in,
And the sliding glass door is standing wide open.
♪ ♪
I was scared.
And it just kind of hit me in my gut.
And my first thought was,
Somebody had obviously been inside my apartment.
♪ ♪
- So, when I come home to my sliding glass door open,
It definitely spooked me.
I felt like there was somebody there.
Like, that's the point I should have called the police,
But I didn't want help from anybody.
Like, no matter what, unless it's, like, dire straits,
I do not want anybody to help me out.
I can do this. It's fine.
I handle one situation one day at a time.
So, the first thing that I did was
To walk through the apartment
And make sure nobody was in there.
[tense music]
I just had a one-bedroom apartment,
So I walked through the living room.
I peeked my head into the kitchen.
♪ ♪
I checked the bathroom,
And then, of course, the bedroom.
And the closet, as well.
♪ ♪
And nobody was there.
♪ ♪
- The sliding glass door was a concern.
The guys heidi had been dating or seeing were pretty sketchy,
And so, the first thing that really came to my mind was,
Hey, one of these idiots is doing something stupid.
♪ ♪
- That night, I'm sitting in my living room.
It's late evening. It's dark outside.
[thud]
I hear a bump on the ceiling.
Since it is apartments,
I thought, maybe somebody's up there installing something.
Maybe they're fixing an antenna.
But this was 9:00 or 10:00 at night.
♪ ♪
I'm staring at the ceiling,
Wondering what could have been up there.
I mean, it sounded like there was definitely a person
Scuttling up on the roof.
I was talking on the phone at the time,
And then I told them that I had heard something.
And then, we just kind of continued on our conversation.
It was very weird, and it definitely stuck in my mind.
♪ ♪
So, my friend had come over that evening
To do something studying.
We had a huge test that was coming up,
So we were just gonna cram all night.
We had spent some time studying in the living room.
And, at some point, we decided we needed to take a break,
And we decided we were gonna just take a walk,
Stretch our legs,
And then get back to studying when we got back.
I left my phone behind.
We had just gone out and come back,
And I know I didn't take my phone with me.
As soon as we got back, I pretty quickly noticed
That I couldn't find my phone.
I thought it was in the couch cushions.
We searched the couch. We searched under the couch.
And we pretty much almost tore that place apart,
And it was completely gone.
♪ ♪
My friend, she was the most honest,
Trustworthy person that I know.
And it crossed my mind, like, where else would it have gone?
Like, she had to have taken it.
But then, at the same time,
Like, there's no way that she would do that.
I would hate to ever accuse her of that.
But she's the only one that was there
And it just went missing.
It was not in that apartment.
♪ ♪
The phone was never recovered.
I went and got a replacement phone
With the same phone number.
I began getting random phone calls from a blocked number.
♪ ♪
I would answer the phone,
And the person on the other end,
You could hear them breathing.
- [breathing heavily]
- At first, you just think it's a wrong number,
Somebody doing a phone prank.
But these continued.
It was months of getting these phone calls
From these blocked numbers.
Somebody was deliberately doing this to me specifically.
♪ ♪
Finally, I got frustrated, and I said,
"why don't you just say something?
"talk to me.
"what's the point of sitting there,
"breathing into the phone?
"I know that you're there. I can hear you.
Say something." and they would just hang up.
♪ ♪
I got pretty fed up with it, to the point that I was like,
Okay, I'm going to unblock this number
And find out who this is.
♪ ♪
I got a phone app that you could unblock a blocked number,
And it would show you what the phone number was.
And pretty quickly, it unblocked the number.
And I called the number,
And a man answered.
I asked, "have you been calling my phone?
A number--this number has been calling my phone."
He said, "no, I have not been calling you.
I don't know who's been calling you."
I said, "look, is anybody using your phone besides you?"
And he said, "my brother uses my phone.
He's the only one."
I said, "okay, tell your brother
If he doesn't stop calling me, I will contact the police."
♪ ♪
I did not ever receive another phone call after that.
♪ ♪
I talk to my mom all the time on the phone,
So I was constantly feeding her little bits
Of, like, what's going on here or there.
My mom was an apartment complex manager,
So she knew the ins and outs of apartments pretty well.
- Me and her stepdad were both talking to her at that time.
We told her to check her apartment for attic access.
♪ ♪
- She said, "there's an attic access
In not all apartments but some."
She told me, "go check your closet
And see if there's an attic access."
The first thing that I did was go straight to my closet.
♪ ♪
And there was an attic access there.
There was a wooden board sitting over a hole.
It wasn't drilled in. It wasn't locked.
It was just a board sitting on a hole.
♪ ♪
- So, I said, "you need to get that nailed shut, immediately."
♪ ♪
- So, I start peeking my head up into the attic.
The second I started to put my head up there,
I just got a very cold chill.
And I got terrified, and I just--
I had to jump down right away.
I couldn't even look.
♪ ♪
I also was talking to my brother,
And he said, "hey, a good idea--
"just put a piece of tape across that board.
"you'll know if the board's been moved
"if the tape is broken.
So then. You'll know if somebody's coming in."
The idea of that being the case and that being true
Was so scary to me that I was just like,
"I'm not gonna put the tape on the door."
I--I want to know, but I don't want to know,
'cause it's so scary,
That it's easier to just, like, "no, that can't be it.
That can't be it. I'm not gonna do it."
♪ ♪
One day, the apartment management had contacted me
And told me that they were going
To be installing lighting
And they had to go up into the attic to install it.
♪ ♪
I made sure to put my dog in a crate
So that the maintenance guys could come in
And install the lighting.
I went to work. I was working that day.
And it was towards the end of the workday
I received a phone call.
It came across on my phone
That it was the apartment complex calling me.
But whenever I answered the phone,
It wasn't the apartment management.
It was a police officer.
And he said, "how quickly can you be home?"
♪ ♪
Something has happened.
♪ ♪
- Heidi called me one afternoon,
And she sounded very upset.
She said, "the police just called me.
They told me to come to the apartment."
- I rushed home as quick as I could.
And I just remember driving home,
And I'm shaking, and I start bawling.
I have this whole mental breakdown.
[tense music]
I pull up to the apartments,
And there are several cops there.
♪ ♪
There's a sex crimes detective that wants to talk to me.
♪ ♪
She actually goes into detail and explains to me
The items that they had found in my attic.
♪ ♪
They had found a knife,
Mace,
Condoms,
Lubrication.
There were pictures of me
And all of my underwear that had been missing.
♪ ♪
- The police found
The person they believed to be responsible.
From the tracks through the attic,
It was pretty clear where the person came from,
And so, he was apprehended quickly.
♪ ♪
- The detective told me that his name was carlos perez.
He was a tenant there at the apartments as well.
He also had an apartment on the second floor
With an attic access,
And it was in the same building as mine.
So, our apartments were the only two apartments
With attic access.
He'd been living in that apartment for four years,
With a family-- with a wife and children.
So, crime of opportunity.
He climbed up there,
And he cut through the firewall
And was coming down into my apartment.
♪ ♪
They found him in his apartment
And arrested him that day.
They found more of my underwear in his apartment as well.
♪ ♪
Police found holes over my bed,
In my living room, and in my bathroom.
There were multiple holes where he had been watching me.
♪ ♪
Everything came full circle to me.
Everything clicked.
All of these random things that were happening
Just suddenly made sense,
And I had this, like, wave of emotions.
Like, terrified, for one.
♪ ♪
Almost relief at having a conclusion
And having answers as to why these things were happening.
But then, the fear overtook that as well.
The thought of somebody being inside of your home and--
You feel like you're safe in your home,
And somebody violating that space.
♪ ♪
- So, my--my worst fears are being realized.
♪ ♪
Yes, it's clear someone was there to--to do harm.
- Just the thought that somebody was, like,
Watching her all that time is really scary.
And, as a parent, you always think that
There's something more that you could have done
To prevent something like that.
♪ ♪
- I felt vindicated,
Having all of these things come to light.
I wasn't crazy.
I finally had proof to tell other people,
Like, all of these things, they really were happening.
I had a phrogger in my apartment.
♪ ♪
I moved out that night.
I took my things and went to my dad's house.
I never went back to that apartment.
Shortly after that, I moved out of tulsa.
- She's still happy-go-lucky.
She just doesn't want something like this to change her.
And she doesn't want to live a fearful life.
She is a little more cautious of her surroundings.
♪ ♪
- Looking back, I was pretty young and naive
And very nonchalant about things.
I think that I was trying to put it out of my mind,
Because being a single woman living by yourself,
You can't be scared of every little bump and creak
That you hear and investigate everything.
You can't live in fear.
You have to be able to put blinders on a little bit.
At this time you do it,
You don't realize that you're doing it.
It's just later that you realize,
"man, I was really just kind of living in a bubble."
This definitely opened my eyes to things.
I was more aware of the surroundings.
I wasn't just in a safe bubble.
This could have gotten so much worse.
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- In 2016, I was living in bucktown, chicago.
Bucktown's really interesting
Because it has a pretty cool medley
Of new buildings, old buildings.
More antiquated structures that are in the area.
A lot of businesses fill in those places,
So it's got a unique vibe to it.
- I'm in it sales, covering the chicagoland area.
I moved to bucktown
Because the area of bucktown was up and coming.
You know, it was really a place to do things,
Walkable distance to great food, great restaurants,
And can easily get into the city
And out of the city for,
You know, the various meetings that I had for work.
So, at that time, when I was living in bucktown,
I lived in a duplex up,
Meaning I had the rights to the rooftop as well.
So, you could walk up into the unit,
Second floor, third floor,
And I had the rooftop access
With full view of the full skyline of chicago,
With only access for my unit.
So, that was a big reason I purchased that unit.
At the time, I had a girlfriend,
Who would, you know, come stay at the place
And, you know, visit often.
- The sunsets from the rooftop are incredible.
The city skyline has this sort of dusk view,
So great lookout point in the summer.
- I'm living in chicago in my bucktown home with two dogs:
My younger puppy, max,
And then I had my older dog, linux.
Both max and linux followed me like a shadow.
Wherever I'm at, they're at my feet.
With anybody that comes to a city like chicago,
From outside the city,
It's very easy to get caught up in the daytime activities--
How nice it looks, people are out and about.
It's one of those things where, on the outside,
You can kind of see and feel safe, and things look good.
But at night, certain things happen,
Certain people come out.
[sirens wailing]
In general, I never saw a lot of crime.
Never had to deal with anything.
So, feeling as safe as I do in that area of chicago,
I didn't actually have full security systems
And things of that nature, which I should have, right?
So, I have a security camera so that,
In the event I have a dog walker
Or a house cleaner come, I'm able to see that
They're, you know, doing the right things,
And in and out, as they should be.
♪ ♪
So, Sunday, July 24th, was like any other Sunday.
That particular day had been a great day for weather.
Spent most of the day actually sitting on a hammock
On my upstairs balcony outside the bedroom.
♪ ♪
That Sunday evening,
My girlfriend and I went out to dinner,
And we walked to a local spot just down the street,
Like we usually would.
- We couldn't stay out for the night.
We had a new puppy to tend to.
And they tend to be pretty high-maintenance,
So we came home, and we just had a night in.
♪ ♪
We were watching television.
And our brand new puppy, max, is a very clingy guy,
So when we're on the couch, he's on the couch with us.
We've got our 13-year-old dog
Asleep at our feet on the living room floor.
Everybody's in one room, watching tv.
♪ ♪
We start watching a show.
End up falling asleep during the show.
♪ ♪
The reason that we had fallen asleep on the couch
That night was because of the new dog.
We had to wash the sheets pretty late in the evening.
He had a accident upstairs, so we were doing laundry.
And the whole evening was actually
Pretty out-of-character, in terms of that.
Normally, we would have been asleep upstairs.
♪ ♪
- So, as if--you know, any streaming television,
Once you're not paying attention,
The tv kind of goes to,
"hey, are you still paying attention to this?"
And it gives you silence, right?
So, there's a point that that silence broke the noise,
I guess, that had been going on in the room, and I woke up.
- I'm exhausted. I'm in zombie mode.
I immediately decide to head upstairs and take the puppy,
Put him back in his kennel, and head to the bedroom.
- We put the sheets on the bed and went to sleep.
♪ ♪
- So, I wake up in the morning.
And we have a bench at the end of the bed,
And I keep my purse there all the time.
I'm certain I put it there.
I wake up, can't see it,
And start to pester jack about it.
- My girlfriend said, "hey, have you seen my purse?"
And that wasn't something I usually really keep track of.
So, we both kind of went through the home to see,
Hey, where could the purse possibly be?
We looked in the bedroom. We looked in the laundry room.
Went through my office.
Looked in the downstairs bedroom.
Checked everywhere we could possibly have left a purse
In the home, and it wasn't there.
♪ ♪
- I was pretty fired up.
In my head, I was convinced he must have moved it and forgot.
- Told her, "hey, I'm gonna check
"the security footage that I have in the house,
And I guaranteed you're walking out of the house with it."
- He is frustrated.
In his mind, I mistakenly put it somewhere and forgot.
So, tension was a little high.
- I was pretty steadfast and sure that that purse
Was gonna be seen walking out of the house with her.
Kind of almost made a bet that that was the case.
♪ ♪
The security came in my home
Was kind of at the front of the living room, if you will.
It shows the whole living room and kind of upstairs as well.
But it gives a great view into the main area of the home,
So I would have easily been able to see,
"hey, you walked out with the purse,
But you didn't return with it."
♪ ♪
- He has his security device hooked up.
So, he goes to the application in there.
- So, as I'm looking through the footage,
You can see, you know, myself on the couch.
You can see the tv to the left,
The kitchen in the background.
To the right, behind me, is the stairs,
And above that is my office.
And above that, on the top right,
Is the hallway that leads back into my master bedroom.
♪ ♪
I'm noticing what's going on in the living room,
What's going on in the frame that's captured
Some of the frames where she had walked out of the home,
And there was no purse in her hand.
Kind of let her know, "okay.
You didn't do it at that point."
And then, kept looking, and there was never a point
Where she had left the home with a purse that day.
♪ ♪
So, as I was fast-forward scrubbing
Through the video footage that I had,
I started to notice something
Very, very slowly move into the frame.
♪ ♪
Rewind it a little bit,
And then found the perfect spot.
And right around 1:00 a.M.,
There happened to be a figure
At the top right, at the stairs.
♪ ♪
- So, we stop the footage immediately.
The purse is completely out of our heads.
We knew we were down on the couch at that point,
And there's a human being standing
At the top of the stairs that shouldn't have been.
♪ ♪
[tense music]
- When I saw the figure at the top of my stairs,
It was absolute fear.
♪ ♪
I am in the house, on the couch,
With my dogs at my feet,
Girlfriend on the couch as well,
And there's this figure at the top of the stairs
Looking down on us.
♪ ♪
- The person standing at the top of the stairs
Was probably about jack's size.
He had on a hoodie, looked like sweats.
♪ ♪
The footage is a little bit grainy,
But we could tell from the footage that it wasn't us.
We don't know who it is.
That was the moment that, you know, we both had--
Our stomachs kind of dropped and we realized that,
"holy crap, there was a stranger standing here."
♪ ♪
- My hand starts sweating, and then I began to quickly think,
My girlfriend, she didn't lose her purse.
There was somebody in my home that took it.
♪ ♪
- So, we sit there looking at the footage
For probably ten minutes.
We're trying to make sense of it.
- He came up from the ground floor,
Three flights of back steps, and into the master bedroom.
The door was unlocked that evening
Because we had been on the hammock.
And that was literally the only time
In five years living there that that door was unlocked.
As I looked at the security footage,
I notice how quiet he was as he came in, almost sloth-like.
♪ ♪
And that neither of my dogs woke up,
I didn't wake up.
He was in my house while we were asleep
For close to 45 minutes.
♪ ♪
- When the show ends and we wake up,
Him leaving the home
Was clearly a reaction to us waking up.
I think he either heard or saw movement.
♪ ♪
He leaves, and a second later, we're up off the couch.
I actually went upstairs first,
Probably not 30 seconds after him.
♪ ♪
I never saw anyone up there.
It's crazy, in hindsight,
To think that if he hadn't immediately vacated the home,
I might have encountered him.
When it finally sinks in that
Someone entered the home while I was sleeping,
While jack was sleeping, it was terrifying.
♪ ♪
We immediately called the police.
♪ ♪
- When I called the police, I explained to them
There had been a break-in in my home
And I wanted to report items that had been stolen.
- Emotions were high before they got there.
A lot of back and forth between us.
We're having a conversation about:
How could someone have gotten in our home?
How could we have not noticed?
Someone made it out there that evening.
A detective was asking us what happened,
Getting statements, you know,
Maybe giving us a little peace of mind
To know that someone's working on this.
- They came, checked out the home,
And they just mentioned,
You know, in chicago, these type of things do happen.
- They did ask for a copy of the security camera footage,
And it was at that point that we were informed
That we were not the first people in the neighborhood
To call the police a stranger matching that description.
♪ ♪
Police had encouraged us to share this.
They wanted to generate a little buzz
So that people would be on their guard.
- There's a bucktown neighborhood watch group.
- So, the neighborhood watch group had been in place.
This was something jack was active in.
So, he would go on there and check.
I think this might have been his first time
Contributing to the neighborhood watch page.
He made sure to post the footage
And let people know what had happened.
- The purpose for neighbors posting
On this social media group is strictly for awareness
So that one has knowledge of criminal events
Going on across the neighborhood
Or even next to their own home.
So, one day, I open the social media page,
And a resident had posted a video from inside their home.
And what I see is a very menacing figure
At the top of his stairs,
Looking down at he and his girlfriend sleeping.
You can see him emerge from the shadows in the background
And is looking around to see what's going on.
And you don't know what he's gonna do.
He's being very careful not to disturb anybody.
And the amount of time that he's there is frightening.
You can see that he's guessing:
Should he continue down the stairs or should he backtrack?
It's ominous.
♪ ♪
After I saw this video,
I needed to get the word out to the community
That this person was creeping around the neighborhood.
I posed a question on our social media page that,
If anybody has seen this perpetrator,
Recognizes them,
To post their accounts
So that we can crowdsource and try and figure out
Who this person is or where he's come from.
♪ ♪
- So, as I logged into the community group
That's there for the bucktown neighborhood,
There were a ton of people in the neighborhood posting,
Showing this individual in the same-looking hoodie
As the person at the top of my stairs,
Going door-to-door, grabbing and jiggling door handles,
Looking for unlocked doors.
- After this video was posted,
Neighbors in bucktown began posting doorbell cams
Of this person, tight shots of his face.
He was unaware that he was being recorded,
And people were posting those images.
♪ ♪
- As I alerted the neighborhood watch group
That also had other issues that evening,
There was some local media
Who were part of that group as well.
♪ ♪
The media wanted to speak to us,
You know, pretty quickly
To alert other folks in the neighborhood what had gone on.
- We had agreed to do a local interview
To help raise awareness.
There's a lot of single women in that neighborhood,
And that was our aim in doing the local interview
For the local station.
It was a shock to me when I got a call
From someone living outside the area, asking about this.
There was, like, a rain of those phone calls that week.
- So, on our social media page,
Some comments were labeling him a "creeper."
So, we had a phrogger in our community
That became known as the bucktown creeper.
♪ ♪
[tense music]
- I thought the moniker of "bucktown creeper" was,
Hey, whatever it took to get the media's attention
And police's attention to go get the guy.
♪ ♪
- That name that they gave him,
I don't know if they just did it to draw readers or viewers
Or if they actually did it to benefit people in the area,
But it did create heightened awareness in the area.
- Jack coming forward accomplished a lot,
In that the community rallied around him
And his incident,
Provided intel, video stills,
Passed that along to law enforcement.
In the next few days,
The amount of submissions were numerous.
♪ ♪
A lot of neighbors were correlating their information
And had said, "I just saw him on this corner,"
Or "I saw him leaving this store."
People had seen him walking down sidewalks,
Walking down alleys,
Middle of the night, middle of the day.
♪ ♪
We had a predator on our hands,
And you don't know what that person's capable of.
And so people were on the lookout for him.
♪ ♪
A few days later, a man was seen in our local library
Using a card to gain access to the internet terminals there
That had belonged to a victim of a residential theft.
♪ ♪
I went into the library and talked the librarian
And said, "that person over there,
"a lot of people have seen him
"creeping around the neighborhood.
Can you look at who he's logged in as?"
And she looked at her terminal and said,
"he's logged in as a woman."
♪ ♪
That clearly was not his library card,
So we knew we had somebody
Who was using a false library card to surf the internet.
♪ ♪
So, he's arrested in the library,
Taken away by the police.
♪ ♪
- When I was contacted and told that somebody was arrested,
It made me feel better, sort of at ease
That, you know, this individual wasn't
Gonna be returning to my home.
Even though I know he had been arrested,
It put a dark spot in my mental state
For, one, the city of chicago,
Two, the safety of my neighborhood.
You know, a lot of different things
Started to not be so positive after that time.
♪ ♪
- So, this guy was arrested,
And a few days later, was let go.
♪ ♪
- The police had an idea of who he was,
But nobody was ever charged for the theft of my purse,
For breaking and entering into our home.
The security footage that we provided
Wasn't clear enough to hold up in court.
♪ ♪
Never got my purse back.
We really didn't get too much follow-up,
Not that we wanted it-- we wanted to put it behind us--
But yeah, there wasn't a whole lot of closure.
- The community was horrified
When they found out that this individual was let go.
The assumption was that he was the same person,
And so, there's a lot of fear
That he's going to continue creeping.
♪ ♪
- The only item stolen was the purse.
The gentleman that was in the home,
He looked around a bit, but I guess,
As the streaming show ended and it got quiet,
He just walked back out the way he came
And grabbed the first thing that came to him.
He grabbed the purse.
♪ ♪
- It left a mark on both of us, I think.
You know, jack started to look into more security measures.
- From the incident I endured in chicago,
And went through, it really opened my eyes
To what can really happen in a big city, right?
So, you have to keep your head on a swivel
And just be alert to your surroundings,
Make sure your doors are locked.
All the things that I didn't think about as much before
Became a much bigger part of my life.
In the city of chicago,
It's very hard to get yourself a weapon,
So I got myself a bunch of weapons,
Which happened to be hammers
That I placed in just about every room
In the event I was on a couch
Or in a guest room or in my office,
If somebody broke into my home.
♪ ♪
- I had an uneasiness living in that house after that.
I think just the dangers that had been in the neighborhood
And chicago overall
Felt a little closer to home after that incident.
- I felt honestly violated, a little bit of ptsd
That someone could be at my back door.
So, looking out that glass from time to time
Really changed my outlook in that bedroom.
- I would be fine if jack was there,
But I did not like sleeping in that house alone.
And I still have that, actually.
I don't need someone sleeping in a bed with me,
But I do not like being the only person in a building,
And I think that phobia's definitely been exacerbated
By what happened that night.
- I had the heart-shocking moment of,
"oh, my god, a phrogger is in my home watching me sleep."
♪ ♪