14 Inches: Jillian's Story: Chapter 5 (Patreon)

She took me to her brother’s house the very next day. She showed me where they had found the body. “Who lives here now?” I asked, looking around.

“Renters,” she said. “Well, we had renters come in a couple months after he died, and they just moved out, but new ones are moving in next week.”

This was a new challenge. The place had been cleaned from top to bottom—probably one-hundred times since the potential murder of her brother. All of his belongings were gone. Parts of the place had been renovated. There was no evidence to be found. Even the windows had been replaced, so I couldn’t inspect them for signs of tinkering… not that I knew what I was looking for anyway.

I sauntered around, feeling suddenly out of my element. I was wondering what I’d gotten myself into. Why did I think I knew how to solve crimes? Because I lucked out once?

“Well?” she said. “Think you can help me?”

I wanted to tell her the truth, but there was just so much hope on her face—hope that I didn’t want to extinguish… not yet. “I can think of a few places to start,” I lied. I really had no idea. It didn’t help that her brother never had any online presence. Searching his name came up with nothing but an obituary, and even that was only a paragraph long.

I asked her to tell me everything about him. I asked for a list of friends and past girlfriends. He had none. “The last time he had a friend… Gosh… he was probably twelve. Before puberty. He was… kind of a loner.” And then she admitted that he had attempted suicide twice before.

He had been unemployed. Supposedly, he had asked a girl out a day before he died—and she had rejected him. “Do you know who?”

“No. Some girl at a grocery store.”

It was my only lead… so I went to the nearby grocery stores with his photo. I asked everyone: workers, customers, even the chip delivery guy. I asked if they recognized him. Everyone, of course, said no.

But one girl—a cashier at Safeway—turned a bit pink before saying no. I hesitated, and then I held the photo closer to her. “Are you sure you don’t recognize him?” If she’d seen him before, she would surely recognize him. I mean… he was quite large, with a very distinct ponytail that he apparently had worn since he was young. He looked a bit like the comic book guy in The Simpsons… like a sweet nerd.

The chubby cashier girl shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

I just knew that she was lying. So I put the photo down and said, “Look… His family really wants some closure.”

“Closure?” she said.

“He’s dead.”

Then, I saw her eyes widen. I saw them starting to become wet. I’d hit a nerve. She definitely knew him. “He asked you out—about a year ago. Right?”

“He asked if I wanted to get a coffee with him,” she admitted. “But I was busy. I was working. And… I don’t drink coffee.”

“Okay, so you do recognize him,” I said, feeling a pang of hopefulness… Though I didn’t think this girl confessing to rejecting the guy was going to prove anything other than suicide…

And, apparently, some people do commit suicide by stabbing themselves in the chest. It’s apparently more common in Japan… but the young man had supposedly been very interested in Japanese culture. Maybe he went the way of the samurai, with a blade to his own heart… but what happened to the weapon?

“Did the two of you ever talk?” I asked.

Her face was dark red now.

“I’m not a police officer. I’m just trying to help the family,” I said.

She looked around. “No. I never talked to him. I mean… in person.”

“What does that mean?”

She sighed. “Is he really dead?”

“Yes.”

“He was the druid in my WoW clan.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

She blinked, biting her lip. “We were in the same Warcraft group. We played together. I mean—I never met him in person… until he came in here and asked me out for coffee. I didn’t even know we both lived in Calgary. We had been playing together for… years. Just playing—gaming. Raiding. And one day, I mentioned that I lived in Calgary. He didn’t say anything back. I didn’t think anything of it—and then he showed up here. The next day, he didn’t show up for our raid. I assumed he was embarrassed and left the clan. That’s it. That’s all I know. I mean it.”

“Was he just not your type?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “He was my type. I—I thought he was cute. He just… came in and took me by surprise, and it was all so overwhelming. I panicked. And I… told him I had a boyfriend.”

“So you did reject him?”

A tear trickled down her cheek. “He just caught me by surprise. And… I’ll be honest—it seemed like a stalker move. I mean—he, like, researched me and found out my real name and where I worked. It was just… so overwhelming. But looking back on it, it’s not like it would have been hard. He just… searched my screen name, and found my Reddit page where I sometimes posted about work.”

And with that information, we were able to find his Reddit page, because he had tried to add her as a friend the day before asking her out. Then, we could see all of his posts—mostly in Warcraft groups and ‘loneliness’ groups. It was actually quite sad…

There was even a post mentioning that he was considering suicide. In that same post, he mentioned his admiration for the samurai.

It really did seem like he had killed himself.

And then, she reached out to me and asked me to come over. I went, and she wanted to show me old chat logs that she had saved. I thought it was curious that she had them saved. I wasn’t sure if they saved automatically, or if she would have physically had to save them…

In the messages, he talked about how he wanted to get into game design. He was even eyeing a program. The girl was quite encouraging. There were pages and pages of messages between them from that Warcraft server: hours and hours of chatting. Honestly, they seemed rather… in love.

“Do you have anything else from him?” I asked. “I mean—it sounds like you two liked each other a lot.”

She blushed, and looked down at her feet. “Um, well, he would send me these cute memes, and, uh… I would print them out. But I don’t know if that’s helpful.”

“Can I see them?” I asked.

She nodded. Then, she went to grab a manilla folder from next to her bed. She kept it next to her bed—that was surely a sign of affection, right?

But as she was pulling out the printed pages, I saw red: little stains on the edges of that folder.

She handed me the pages. A couple of them had red stained edges, as it they’d been touched by bloodied hands.

“Can I hold onto these? Just so I can scan them and whatnot…”

She seemed tense. She looked like she wanted to tell me no, but she folded. “I’ll get them back, right?”

“Of course,” I said.

The next day, I took them to a lab. At my own expense, I had that blood tested—and it was a match: it was his blood.

My heart sank. Did she kill him? And if so… why?

I just couldn’t imagine her to be a killer. She was too… sweet. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t capable of committing an evil deed.

I spent the next week mulling over everything, and eventually, I found something. It was tedious, but I went through her Reddit posting history. I found the groups she frequently participated in. Then, I spent hours and hours searching through those groups, looking up posts made around the day of his death. And then… I found a post by a ‘throwaway’ account. The language in the account was so remarkably similar to her own language: the same errors, the same wording, the same word choices… And, of course, the story was eerily familiar.

“I was so in love with this guy, and he came to ask me out—but I panicked. I don’t know why, but I got so scared, and for some reason I lied about having a boyfriend. He looked so heartbroken, and I felt so stupid. So the next day, I decided to go and find him, to tell him how I felt—and to tell him I lied about the boyfriend. I spent hours tracking him down. Then, I went to his house, and I looked through the window after he didn’t answer… and I saw his body on the floor. He had stabbed himself. He was dead. I just know he did it because of me.

“The back door was unlocked. I used a rag to open it, so I wouldn’t leave prints. I shimmied in on a couple pieces of paper so I wouldn’t leave tracks. I picked up the knife, and then I snuck back out. I just didn’t want anyone to know that he killed himself. I didn’t want anyone to know that he died over me.

“I’m thinking of turning myself in. But… if I do… Will they think I killed him? My prints are on that knife now. Will they believe me if I say that I was just trying to protect him from the shame of killing himself? God—I feel so stupid.

“I ditched the knife way out in the woods behind my house. They don’t have dogs that can find stuff like that, do they? Would they even think to look? I don’t know what to do. I’m panicking. I made a huge mistake… But the biggest mistake was telling him that I had a boyfriend.”

I went to the woods. I spent probably close to ten hours poking around the forest floor—until I found it: the knife, bloodied. Carefully, I marked the spot and I put the knife in a bag. I had it tested. The blood was his. The story added up.

But I didn’t take all of my findings to the police. Instead, I took everything to the sister. I showed it all to her and I told her that she could go to the police if she wanted to. She thanked me. She smiled—it was closure, even if it wasn’t what she wanted to find out: that her brother really did commit suicide in a sad, painful way.

I wrote an article and submitted it to TREND Magazine, changing the names to protect those involved. And I was kind of stunned when they replied, willing to buy my story: one-thousand dollars. And it turned out to be the first of many. A family got some closure, and I had the rent money I needed to live for another month.