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Transcript of Out With A Bang • This will surely be my most disturbing video of 2024 (No bait. Esp "Escalation")

MrBallen Podcast
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Transcription of Out With A Bang • This will surely be my most disturbing video of 2024 (No bait. Esp "Escalation") from MrBallen Podcast Podcast
00:00:00

Today, I'm going to share three progressively more disturbing stories, and at the end of each of them, I will share the photo that is famously associated with that story. But before we get into those stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload once a week. So if that's of interest to you, please replace all of the like buttons toilet paper with duct tape. Also, please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads. Okay, let's get into today's stories. At 1:00 PM on November second, 2020, an older man named Marcel Therré, stood in his backyard hanging damp clothes on a clothesline. Marcel and his wife, 83-year-old Paulette Landrou, lived on a quiet street in the small city of Anden, Belgium. And usually, their days were filled with household chores or visits from their kids. But over the last few months, Marcel had started to spend a lot more time taking care of his wife because she had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's disease is a type with dementia that causes memory loss and confusion.

00:01:18

And so Paulette needed help remembering to eat or to take her medications on time. And sometimes she would just wander off without telling Marcel, and Marcel would have to go corral her and bring her back home. For Marcel, watching Seeing his wife struggle with this disease was absolutely heartbreaking. And so he did everything in his power to make her life as comfortable and happy as he possibly could. Before he had come out to hang up the laundry, he had made sure to set his wife up in front of the TV with a nice lunch so she could eat and watch her favorite show. Marcel hung up the last piece of clothing and then picked up the empty laundry basket and headed back towards the house. When he went inside, he expected to see his wife still sitting on the couch watching TV, but she wasn't there anymore. Marcel immediately began calling his wife's name, but she didn't call back. Then he searched the whole house and he couldn't find her. Starting to panic, he went outside, he searched the outside of the house, she wasn't there. He even knocked on some neighbors doors, but they hadn't seen her.

00:02:12

At this point, Marcel was very scared, given the fact that his wife had Alzheimer's and could easily wander off and put herself in a very dangerous situation without even knowing. Instead of waiting any longer to just hope she showed up again, he picked up the phone and he called the police. Less than an hour later, Marcel stood outside of his house looking at helicopters flying overhead, and he knew at least half a dozen officers were spread out around the neighborhood, knocking on neighbors' doors. There were canine units searching the surrounding area. This huge search, it was all for Paulette. Marcel was glad to see that clearly the police had taken the search very seriously, and so he was confident that they would find his wife and that hopefully she'd be okay. But the hours kept ticking by, and as the sun began to go down, there still was no sign of Paulette. A police officer told Marcel that they would keep on investigating and hopefully his wife as soon as possible. But over the next few days and weeks, Paulette didn't turn up. Nobody had any idea where she was. And before long, weeks turned into months, and then months turned into two full years that nobody had seen Paulette.

00:03:14

And by that point, Marcel had basically resigned himself to the fact that he very likely would die without ever figuring out what happened to his wife. But then, one day in early October of 2022, so two years after Paulette went missing, one of Marcel and Paulette's was at home on their computer looking at a particular website. And as they were scrolling through this website, they happened upon an image that as soon as they saw it, they froze. Because this neighbor was very well aware of the fact that Paulette had gone missing and nobody had found her. But now they're seeing this image on this website that basically gives away what happened to her. And so totally shocked that they had even found this image, the neighbor screenshotted it and brought it to the police. So it would turn out that neighbor was looking at Google Street View, which is a feature of Google Maps that basically allows you to see 360-degree views of basically anywhere on the planet. To create these images, Google literally sends out these special vehicles all over the world that have cameras that sit on top of the cars. And these cars drive down basically all the streets, all over the place, constantly taking pictures all around them.

00:04:22

And it just so happened on the exact day that Paulette went missing in 2020, there happened to be a Google car driving down the road that captured a picture of her. And so as you can see in the picture of her, you see Paulette on the left side of the image walking across the street away from her home, which is on the right side. And on the right side, you can actually see Marcel in the backyard hanging up laundry on the clothes beeline. And so the police, after getting this image, they basically followed the projected route Paulette was on, which is basically beelining straight across the road. And they found that across the street was this steep hill that led down to this thick bramblebush. And inside of that bramblebush was Paulette, and she was deceased. And so very likely, Paulette, in her confused state, walked straight across the street, as we see in the image, and then fell down that hill and got trapped at the bottom inside of that bramblebush and couldn't move. And so when that huge search for her was going on, very likely she was just trapped down there but didn't understand what was going on, couldn't necessarily yell up to communicate with anybody.

00:05:26

And so she stayed down there and died. And unfortunately, it would take two more full years and a random image on Google Streetview before Marcel could finally get the closure he needed. Thank you to Better Health for sponsoring today's video. I've talked a lot about how therapy really helped me when I left the military in 2017. It took time, but I went from being this very angry person who was struggling with depression to feeling like I was at peace and content again. And today, part of the The reason I still consider myself to be very well adjusted is because of the skills I have learned in therapy. The most important skill that I find myself leaning on most days is self-awareness, something I definitely lacked pre-therapy. Now, I'm very in tune with how I feel and how it affects me personally, but also how it affects the people around me. My mood and behavior can have an enormous effect on my friends and family, and I need to be aware of that. That self-awareness keeps me from spiraling struggling when I start to struggle. So while therapy is certainly not a one-size-fits-all solution, I do think it's a great starting point for anybody who's struggling.

00:06:39

And while therapy can be costly, there are affordable options, such as online therapy platforms like Betterhelp. Betterhelp is on a mission to make starting therapy easier. All you have to do is fill out a quick questionnaire, and then you'll be paired up with a licensed Betterhelp therapist within a couple of days. One of the best features of Betterhelp is that if the first therapist does not feel like the right fit, you can continue to switch therapists until you find someone you really connect with, and it's at no additional cost. So really, Betterhelp is trying to find the right person for you. So if you're struggling right now and you think you might benefit from a therapy session, click the link in the description below, or go to betterhelp. Com/misterbaulin for 10% off your first month of therapy. Okay, back to the story. Around 10:00 AM on July 26th, 2015, a 31-year-old mom named Xiang Luzhuan and her husband chased their two-year-old son around a brand indoor playground. This playground was on the sixth floor of a mall in Jinzhou City, which is in central China. And so Xieung and her husband had come to this mall today just so their son could basically enjoy this playground.

00:07:56

And currently, he was running around in circles and laughing hysterically. He thought it was great. Xieung caught up to her son and scooped him up and then placed him at the top of a slide, and he happily slid down to the bottom. And when he reached the bottom, Xieung was waiting for him, and the son, he just stopped and looked past her and pointed and started saying, Ride, ride, And so Xieung, she turned around and she saw right behind them were these two escalators, one going up and one going down. And so Xieung realized her son clearly thought these escalators were maybe a part of this playground. And so he wanted to go use them. They were a fun attraction. And so Xieung smiling and took her son's hand and then told her husband they're going to go ride the ride, the escalators, and then they began walking over. Once Xieung and her son actually reached the escalator, suddenly her son was not as keen to hop on board. He was nervous. But Xieung, who had ridden escalators many times before, told her son it's totally safe, and she coaxed him to do it. And eventually, he stepped on right alongside her, holding her hand.

00:08:53

And about halfway up the escalator, when she was confident her son would be okay, Xiang turned around and looked up towards the top of the escalator, the seventh floor where they were going. And she saw three mall employees at the top of the escalator on the seventh floor where they were going. And they were clearly looking at Zhang with a very serious look on their faces, and they were gesturing at something towards the top of the escalator. It seemed like they could be warning her about something or simply pointing something out. She wasn't really sure. And so she looked up at them like, What's going on here? But the three mall employees just didn't do a good job communicating whatever was going on or whatever issue they were dealing with. And so as a result, Xiang and her son just continued riding up the escalator. And as they got closer and closer, these mall employees continued to gesture at something happening on the seventh floor just beyond the escalator, and Xiang still totally confused. And then finally, when Xiang and her son reached the top and stepped off, Xiang suddenly understood what these employees were referencing.

00:09:55

But by now, it was too late. Moments later, Xiang's husband, who was still down below on the sixth floor at the playground, he heard the sound of his wife and son screaming over near the escalator. And so instinctively, he bolted over to the escalator. He didn't see his wife, didn't see his son, and he began going up the escalator when someone at the top screamed at him to stop and get off the escalator. And so he did. Right then, a mall employee came running down the other side, carrying his son, and this person handed the son over to Xiang's husband. And this employee, who clearly was completely shocked by whatever had happened up above, just shook their head. It would turn out earlier that day, those mall employees who were at the top gesturing to Zhang, they had discovered a defect with the metal platform that sits right at the top of the escalator on the seventh on the floor. Basically, when you get off this escalator, it's the platform you step onto first. They had found there was something wrong with it. It wasn't stable. But instead of immediately blocking off the escalator to make sure nobody walked on it and then go get it repaired, these employees just nonchalantely allowed the escalator to continue, stationed a couple of them at the top to make sure nobody used the escalator, and then called for a repairman.

00:11:09

But the repairman hadn't shown up and fixed this problem by the time Xiang and her son boarded the escalator. And these employees at the top knew there's this huge issue with the platform they're going to step on the second they get off. But they failed to communicate the danger to Xiang and her son as they were coming up. They just broadly gesticulated that there was some issue up here and to watch out for it, but Xiom had no idea. And so by the time she got to the top and stepped off the escalator onto that platform, well, the defect with the platform is that it caved in with any weight. And so she fell into the escalator where the teeth of the escalator was rotating. And as she was getting pulled in to her death, her final moment captured on video as she took her son and thrusted him to the employees, saving his life before she disappeared. Disappeared and died inside the inner workings of the escalator. Following Zhang's death, there was a full scale investigation, and quickly, there were massive safety failures identified on the part of the company who made the escalator and also on the mall itself.

00:12:14

Two people were ultimately arrested in connection with Xieung's death, and these safety failures and the mall reportedly offered to pay some settlement to Xieung's family. However, the details of that settlement have not been made public. One morning in November of 1997, a police captain named Jeffrey Louis, along with his partner, parked their squad car near the Manatee River in Bradenton, Florida, which is a small city just south of Tampa. A few minutes earlier, the Bradenton Police Department had received a call from this frantic man who had said he had found something suspicious that had washed up on the shore of this river. And so Captain Lewis and his partner were there to investigate. And so as soon as they got out of their squad car, this man who had called the police, he saw them and waved them down, and he was pointing at something in the sand. And so Captain Lewis and his partner, they walked over, and before they even talked to this guy, they just looked down at what he was pointing at, and right away they could see why he called the police, because there, sitting on the sand, was a severed human hand.

00:13:22

And so the instant Captain Lewis saw this, his first thought was actually just alligators, because there were alligators that swam in the Manatee river, and people were told about them and were told not to go swimming here, but people still did. And so his thought was, well, maybe one of the alligators got a swimmer. However, when Captain Lewis looked at the hand more closely, he could tell right away that that probably did not happen. In, because where the hand had been cut off from the body, the cut was almost surgical. It was very, very neat. Whereas if an alligator had ripped the hand off, it would be rough. But this almost looked like a surgeon had carefully removed the hand. And so what this signaled to Captain is this hand very likely represented a murder victim. Somebody who killed this person, cut their body up, and one of their body parts is now washed ashore. And so Captain Lewis turned to his partner and told him to call for backup. And within an hour, police officers were scouts towering the Manatee River, looking for the body that belonged to this hand. Meanwhile, the captain bagged this hand as evidence and brought it to the County Sheriff's crime lab, hoping that forensic experts could potentially figure out who the victim was using fingerprints.

00:14:29

However, when he actually handed over the hand to these forensic technicians, they told Captain Lewis that it was very likely going to be impossible to try to pull prints from this hand because the hand was very badly decomposed and water damaged. But they told Captain Lewis that despite this being a total long shot, they would still give it a try. And so really all Captain Lewis had was this hand, and so he just waited for information from the crime lab about the fingerprints. And before long, the waiting went from days to weeks to months with no fingerprints. And So with no fingerprints and no other breakthroughs in this case, Captain Lewis moved on to other cases. That is until June of 1998, when Captain Lewis was sitting in his office doing some work, when he suddenly got a call from the crime lab about the hand. An employee told Captain Lewis they had finally made a breakthrough. When they couldn't get the prints off this hand at first, they had moved to this very complicated technique, where basically they would peel individual layers of skin off the hand and piece together all the information to get a print.

00:15:32

And amazingly, this technique worked. And so not only did they now have the sprint, but they had also already run the sprint through the Florida State database, and they had gotten a match. The hand belonged to a man named Willy Settle. As soon as he hung up, Captain Lewis opened up a new tab on his computer and began researching Willie Suttle to figure out who this person was. And he quickly found through public employment records that Willy had been a retired garbage collector, and then also Captain Lewis looked at police records and discovered that Willy had a minor criminal history. But what really stood out in his research about Willy was that Willy had never been reported missing. Willy had instead been reported dead. Right there in the public records that Captain Lewis was looking at, he found Willy's death certificate. In this document said, Willy had died of natural causes five months prior to his hand washing up on shore. And also it said, Willy had been buried in a local cemetery and no police had ever been involved in his death because no crime had been committed. And so Captain Lewis was baffled. None of this made any sense.

00:16:33

If Willy had died of natural causes and been buried over a year ago, then how did his hand, his severed hand, wind up on the shore of the Manatee River? The next day, which was Friday, June 26th, Captain Lewis, along with a few other police officers, went to the cemetery where Willy had been buried, and they exhumed his casket. And when they opened it up, they actually expected it to be empty, considering his hand was already missing, so probably his whole body was But no, when they opened it up, there was Willy missing his left hand. But that wasn't all. At the bottom of Willy's casket were all of his internal organs just sitting there in a rotting pile. And so Captain Lewis is staring at this, having no idea what to make of it. But the first thought he had was, okay, maybe somebody tried to rob Willy's casket. But he's thinking, if they did that, why did they cut out his organs and stash him at the bottom of the casket? And also, why did they remove his left hand and chuck it in the river. That doesn't make any sense. It felt like every clue Captain Lewis found was only making this case harder to solve.

00:17:37

But he hoped when he sent off Willy's body to the county medical examiner, that they would be able to provide him with some more answers as to what happened here. Later that afternoon, the county medical examiner would perform an autopsy on Willy's body. The first thing he noticed when he began was that despite the fact that Willy's organs clearly had been removed, that Willy's abdomen did not appear sunken in. It appeared So the medical examiner started the autopsy by cutting open Willy's abdomen to see what was in there. And when he saw what was inside of Willy, he just froze, having no idea how to react to what he was looking at. He had never seen anything like this in his entire career, not even close. And so the medical examiner just grabbed a camera, took some pictures of Willy's midsection, and sent those pictures to Captain Lewis. The next day, Captain Lewis sat inside of an interview room in the police station, across from a 45 woman named Paula Green, All-Briton. Paula owned and operated a funeral home along with the help of her son, and she had been the one responsible for Willy Suttle's burial.

00:18:39

And so Captain Lewis asked Paula about Willy's burial, and she would tell him that Willy had actually died in poverty without any family members to help cover his burial expenses. However, when Paula had found out about this, she said she had agreed to do the burial anyways for no cost as a community service. However, when Captain Lewis poked and prodded and tried to ask for more information about exactly what that meant, Paula would eventually concede that there actually was slightly more to her rationale behind wanting to do Willy's burial. It was not just for charity. Two days after this interview, police arrested both Paula and her son. At Paula's trial, the truth surrounding what happened to Willy finally came out. It would turn out Paula's funeral home business was really struggling to the point where if she couldn't start generating some real money, her business might go under, and she couldn't have that. Paula decided she would conduct a prosperity ritual to write her business. But to perform this prosperity ritual, Paula needed a body. Along comes Willy Suttle, who's died in in poverty, and his family can't afford his funeral. Paula says, Don't worry, I'll take him on for free.

00:19:51

But really what she needed was Willy's body. Once Paula and her son had possession of Willy's body, they began the ritual, which started with Paula's son carefully cutting off Willy's left hand, and then the two of them cut Willy's midsection open, removed all his internal organs, and then Paula got out all these voodoo dolls, and she wrote on pieces of paper the names of the other funeral homes, her competitors in the area, and she pinned these pieces of paper to each of these voodoo dolls. And then she took those voodoo dolls and jammed them inside of Willy's abdomen in the empty cavity they had created, and then they stitched them back up. And Then she took Willy's body and his organs, and she chucked them into a cheap casket and had him buried. Then she also took the hand that her son had removed. She put it inside of a plastic bag, added some weight to it, and chucked it into the Manatee River. Paula believed this voodoo ritual would literally cause the owners of the other funeral homes, whose businesses she wrote down on the dolls and jammed inside of Willy's body, that this ritual would literally cause all of them to be struck down and killed, putting their businesses out of business, thereby leading to her business prospering once again.

00:21:04

However, none of these things came to fruition. The ritual did not work the way Paula intended it to. Instead, the hand that she had thrown into the river ultimately washed ashore, and before long, the police figured out what Paula and her son had done. In 1999, so two years after Willy's hand had washed up on shore, Paula and her son were found guilty of desecrating Willy's corpse. Paula's son ultimately served one year in prison. As for Paula, her conviction was actually quickly overturned due to a technicality. It was discovered that during an interview with Paula that police detectives told her that she could not be convicted if this ritual was part of a religious practice, that she was protected under the US Constitution. And so Paula, who confessed to doing this ritual, did so by saying it was part of her religion. She practiced voodoo. I am a voodooist, and I've because I know how to survive. And that's a part of my religion. And so in court, that confession was ruled inadmissible, and so she walked free. Here is a photo of the 12 voodoo dolls found inside of Willy's body with the notes Paula wrote cursing her competition still attached.

00:22:23

Are you the type of person who has binged basically all of my YouTube videos? Every week, you anxiously waited a new upload? If so, thank you. But also you're in luck. Because if you didn't know this, we actually have a separate podcast, the Mr. Ballen podcast, that has literally hundreds of stories that are not on YouTube that you can binge right now. That podcast is available on all podcast platforms. Again, it's just called the Mr. Ballen podcast. And on Mondays on that podcast, we upload exclusive new content that is not on YouTube to the podcast. That's Mondays. And Then on Thursday, we remaster the audio of your favorite videos on YouTube and put those on the podcast. But again, Mondays, those are brand new and exclusive to the podcast. But if you want to hear those exclusive episodes one month ahead of Apple and Spotify and all the other platforms, well, there's only one place you can do that, and that's on Amazon Music. So again, you can go to any podcast platform and find the Mr. Ballen podcast, or if you're like me and you hate waiting, then you can listen early and ad-free on Amazon Music.

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