Paint “No Rules” on the water tower.
—Aesop Rock
Transcript Excerpt, Nightwatchman Podcast Episode 251, Uploaded 6/1/21, 03:47 a.m.:
Welcome to another broadcast for the thinkers, drinkers, freaks, geeks, smokers, jokers, fornicators, freedom fighters, and other fuckups who populate these early hours. As always, you’re listening to the Nightwatchman, the only man brave enough to tell you the truth, the one media source you can depend on, throwing you the life preserver of legitimate facts in this ever-stormier sea of lies we call the big ol’ US of A.
Now I know our listeners are chompin’ at the bit for some follow-up on the Adam Colson case and what Brazil’s sudden willingness to play ball and extradite a dual citizen means for the other war criminals currently sipping caipirinhas on the sandy beaches of Ipanema. And we’ll get to that. I promise. But first there are a couple of particularly questionable items in the news that we want to shine a light on tonight with the return of a little feature we call the Yeah Right Roundup.
First, we’ve got the discovery of a new, even-more-insidious security-breaching “back door” on your phone, thanks to the undeletable MoonLite trashware app installed on most every device regardless of manufacturer. Now, I know regular listeners would never walk around with an off-the-shelf version of Stalin’s Dream in their pocket, but maybe you’re a newer listener who thinks these back doors aren’t being exploited by the government and/or corporations in tandem. Maybe you think, They’d never track me. They’d never listen to me. And to that I say…
Yeah, right.
If you want a way to close these back doors, or find hardware that’s built for clean, encrypted communications, stay tuned through the end of the show and we’ll have some solid, NW-endorsed products to tell you about.
Next up we’ve got grimmer fare: a murder-suicide that seems ’bout as fishy as a deep-sea trawler. Open your ears for me and listen to this article from Turner Falls’ local paper, the Observer, and tell me if any of this makes a lick of sense to you.
“Mother, Son Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide
“Turner Falls, OR—Police are investigating a possible murder-suicide that left a young man and his mother dead.
“Officers found the pair just before eight a.m. Saturday in the 1700 block of Kensington Avenue.
“Police said they received a 911 call from a concerned neighbor who heard a struggle and checked in on the family only to discover the bodies of the deceased. First responders pronounced both the mother and son dead at the scene.
“ ‘This is an incredibly difficult situation for everybody involved,’ said Sergeant Bill Remar, Turner Falls PD.
“Police are investigating the case as a murder-suicide. Remar would not describe any injuries or possible cause of death, or release the names of the deceased citing the pending notification of next of kin and the ongoing nature of the investigation.
“The Turner Falls School District has confirmed the youngest victim attended Summit Ridge High School. The district released a statement saying it was heartbroken to learn of the passing of one of its students.
“The extended family of the deceased were contacted but gave no response.
“Update: The sheriff’s office said Saturday that the victims are seventeen-year-old Brady Miller and forty-two-year-old Julie Miller, both of Turner Falls. They are survived by estranged father and husband Samuel Miller, a development lead for local medical supply manufacturer IMTECH. He is not considered a subject of interest in the investigation and could not be reached for comment.
“Update/exclusive: The Observer has obtained a statement from Constance Logue, the neighbor who discovered the deceased. Logue said, ‘I heard yelling, and a car door slamming. Then the Millers’ dog wouldn’t stop barking, which isn’t something we’ve ever had a problem with. We’re friendly, so I walked over to check, and when I noticed the front door was cracked open I knocked to let them know I was coming in. I tripped over some luggage in the foyer and noticed that a vase full of flowers in the entryway had been knocked to the floor. Something about that, and the dog… I got goose bumps. You could feel something was wrong. Then I walked around the corner into their living room, and I found Brady and Julie. That poor boy… lying on the couch, a pillow still smashed over his face. And Julie was lying on the floor near him with an empty bottle of her heart pills on the coffee table. I thought about CPR, but I could tell by the way they looked that I couldn’t help them. I ran back to my house and locked the door and called 911. While I was waiting for them I couldn’t stop thinking that this didn’t make any sense. Julie loved that boy. So did Sam. Even when they were splitting up, he was their little angel, you could tell. I can’t picture either of them hurting a hair on his head, and I… They only ever wanted the best for him. It’s senseless. It just breaks my heart.’ ”
So that’s where it stands right now, listener. Obviously it’s sad, and it’s tragic, and at first glance maybe that’s all it is. You can imagine a mom at wits’ end, under some insurmountable pressure—maybe a husband who’s about to take full custody—doing something like that. Because it happens. It does. People break.
But… BUT… longtime listeners know that we’ve had our eyes and ears on Turner Falls for a while now, ever since half the companies in Big Data simultaneously decided to build their largest-ever centers on the edges of the quaint little tourist-trap ski town. You can go all the way back to episode two thirty-five and give it a listen again for the full details… There was no specialized workforce, no environmental benefits… but all of a sudden the world’s billionaires can’t get enough of that high desert real estate. It. Doesn’t. Track. AND the Nightwatchman’s crack research staff are taking a look at some other business, shall we say, quirks, in the area, and that includes this Samuel Miller’s company, IMTECH. There’s definitely something else going on, and we’re peering as hard and deep as we can into that darkness to see the whole picture. So listen—you’ve got to be patient with us before we can report on that, because we like to rely on a little something the dying breed known as journalists used to call FACTS.
But, folks, even without all that, even if there were no other reason to give Turner Falls the old suspicious side eye, there are still enough things in this article to get your antennae up, aren’t there?
We’ve got an estranged husband who is somehow NOT a person of interest in the kind of case where the husband is always the first person of interest. What does the Turner Falls PD know about this man that we don’t? We’ve got a neighbor reporting signs of a struggle and the sound of a car door slamming, which could be a third party fleeing the scene. We’ve got luggage packed at the entry to the house. Now let me ask you, who packs up for a trip just before killing their child and themselves? On top of that we’ve got a forty-two-year-old woman overwhelming and suffocating a healthy seventeen-year-old male, who the neighbor describes as positioned on a couch like he was napping and not fighting for his life. And then we’ve got an overdose by heart medication, which, you know, we’ve researched, and that’s not something people do. You go mixing nitrate drugs with something like Viagra, then sure, you could vasodilate yourself to death, but killing yourself with heart pills alone… wildly unlikely and uncommon. Now, we know that the murderers in murder-suicides have a tendency to leave the room where they’ve just killed, especially in family cases. The thinking is that the remorse pushes them away and drives their suicide. Most common place to find the murderer is the backyard, separate from what they’ve done. But here they find mom laid out next to her son…