Transcript of Knock, Knock

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Please welcome to the stage, Ed Hedges. Hello. My name's Ed. I woke up to that noise coming from my front door on the 22nd of July, 2015, and we're going to talk about that in a minute. But first, hello. How are you? You well? Yeah, good. You seem lovely. I've seen you've fucked up the bar, which is nice. Very British of you, I feel, at home. This is already my favorite city on the face of the Earth because...

It was pouring in Scotland. One of those surprise summer storms that barges in like an uninvited guest, sending all the tourists running for cover. I was just trying to make the best of my vacation, so I slipped into a makeshift Comedy Club off of Southbridge Street. It smelled of mildew in beer, but the mood was warm, all thanks to a man on stage.

I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different. Just be calm. It's going to be fine. I'm not one of those comedians that piques on people at all. There's some comedians that come out on stage and they're like, Hey, what's that in your drink? Come. I'm not that guy. I'm going to tell you a story, right? It's going to be one story all the way through. There's a few things I need you know about this story before we kick off. It's true. Everything I'm going to tell you is completely true, apart from three things. There are three lies in this story. I'm going to tell three lies. It just helps it move a little bit better. Is that okay with you? Cool. Okay. And what I'm going to do is when I tell a lie, I'm instantly going to say that was a lie. And no one needs to believe a lie for long.

The thing is, I walked in the show that night seeking a brief escape, a quick laugh while the rain passed. But For what I found was a story, one that would shape my life for the next nine years. Inquests into the death of a woman and a man in Stansted Mountain.

They found a lifeless body slumped on the sofa and covered in her own congealed blood.

He also repeatedly stabbed and caused a fatal head injury.

At least 41 stab wounds to the head, neck, and torso, plus 14 blunt force injuries and defensive wounds.

And this story, it wasn't a joke. It definitely was not a joke.

From Tenderfoot TV, I'm Jody Tove, and this is Why crack. Episode 1, Knock, Knock.

Hello, Edinburgh.

How are you doing? Hell, yeah. How are you doing? It's good to be here.

The Edinburgh Fringe is the largest performing arts festival in the world, attracting some 3 million people to Scotland's capital each year.

One time I was at a bar that closed early because a guy got in a fistfight with his mom.

That's how it's going down.

For a few weeks each August, every spare pantry and broom closet in town is turned into a performing arts venue. Anyone with a dream of becoming famous rushes to get their turn in front of the mic. I was in town to enjoy the festival, a Scottish vacation to beat the Atlanta heat, and to take a breather from my job. I'm a freelance television producer. Most of my career is focused on true crime stories, and week after week of studying the of complex criminal minds of murderers, well, it can wear you down. I needed a break. When the storm hit, I ducked into this 1830s drapery warehouse that had been temporarily transformed into a comedy club. And that's where I saw Ed Hedges perform for the first time.

I think before you crack on with the show properly, I should talk about me a little bit, so I'm not just a weirdo on stage telling you a story. My name is Ed. Everyone say, Hello, Ed. Hello. I'm a comedian. I'm from the UK. I'm from a little village, a very small village just outside of London, you wouldn't have heard of it. It's called Saffromouden. There's not a lot there, like 4,000, 5,000 people there. I'm from a very rural background myself. My dad is a farmer and my mom is a cousin, so it's It's not loads going on. It's not a super jump in place. I spent my whole life until I was 18 in this little village, and I was the most popular kid in the school, and that is the first lie of the show. See? See how it's going to work. It's going to be fine. You're going to be fine.

I did improvisation. I sat in the back of the room, blotting my wet hair with a cocktail napkin. The seats were about half full, I'd say 30 or 40 people. I remember thinking to myself two things. This kid has this tired, soaked audience eating out of his hand, confident in his comic timing. And the second thing I remember thinking is, why did he tell us he was going to lie? Comedy at its roots is about exaggerating reality, distorting the truth so you can laugh at it. I mean, no one comes to a comedy show expecting the unvarnished truth. So why does this comedian feel the need to tell us that? Hey, it's Jody. As you know, we love a good mystery at Wise Crack, and I want to tell you about a podcast that we've been listening to called Wobegon. It's a story of Mike Walters, a person who stumbles into a mysterious online game. But here's the catch. This isn't just a game. It's giving Tron meets Severance with some really crazy twists and turns. Obviously, we're very big fans over here, and If you like sci-fi or deep character stories, this is the pod for you.

New episodes of Wobegon drop every Wednesday, each with an all-original soundtrack that pulls you even deeper into the Wobegon world. So find the show on Rusty Quil podpod. Com, or wobegondpod, W-O-E-B-E-G-O-N-E, podpod. Com.

I wasn't the most popular kid in the school.

I was bullied relentlessly in school. I had ADHD, dyslexia, and asthma, so I was into shaking stuff and wheezing. It was awful. I love that we just got a woo for asthma. I can only imagine that woo took every ounce of air you had.

Thank you.

Also, another thing on top of that is I was a really chubby kid. I was a proper chubby kid. I was this little chubby ball of energy. When I was 15, just to put it in context, I was 250 pounds. So, yeah, correct response. Just… Your mom didn't do a good job, did she? I don't know that.

Ed is anything but 250 pounds. He's actually quite fit with these soft brown eyes and a mop of pearls. Like many young comedians, he's got a bit of a mischievous aura. But there's an undeniable charm about him, the kind that when he grins, you can't help but smile back.

The weird thing about it was I was bullied my entire childhood in the village by one guy. I had one bully from kindergarten to the end of my school career, the same guy, which a lot of people think is quite sad. I think he's sweet. I think that's so nice. He saw me and he was like, This you, you're the one. I'm going to make your life hell for 10 years. His name was Ryan Goddard. It's like a manly name, Goddard. He was perfect. Ryan Goddard was perfect. He was the perfect... He was like alpha, like a specimen. He was pretty. He had long blonde hair. He was in great shape. Girls loved him. He was charismatic. He was the nicest guy in the world, unless you were me. He was athletic. He was pretty. He always had a tan, even in winter, in the UK. It's unheard of. He was brilliant at most things, and I simply wasn't. I just wasn't. The worst thing about it was he lived four doors down from me for my entire childhood. What he would do, he'd wait at the end of his garden for when I was walking to the school bus, and he would just bully me.

One time, there was a three-week period where he'd go to the local bakery before school, which is like a 6: 00 AM commitment. He'd buy donuts and he'd pelt me with them from the bridge. But here's the thing, I'm ashamed to say it. He got them so early, they were really fresh and good. Every time they'd hit me, I'd be like, Oh, what That's good stuff. Eventually, I got really good at catching the donors, and my catching got so good, I got on the cricket team, which is like, Hey. To the point where Keith, the cricket coach, was like, Ed, We're going to give you a game. Your catching and breasts have increased massively. I wasn't good. Ryan was good. Ryan was like everything I wanted to be. Even though he bullied me, I wanted to be like him. He was so good at sport. I was always jealous that he was good at sport. I've never been good at sport, ever. I've never played a sports game, really. I've never won a sport. I've won one award in my entire life for sports. I'll tell you about that really quickly. It was called the Jack Petschee Clubman of the Year.

You wouldn't have heard of it. The award was formulated by a man called Jack Petschee. He's like a businessman in my little area of the world who was, I don't want to say disgraced, but he was what I will call a naughty businessman. He gave the award to people that had helped out with sports clubs or sports association in a non-sporting way. Basically, what it was meant for people with severe life-changing disabilities and really elderly people that had been a huge part of their community. On the Jack Petschee website to this day, you can see 12 people that have severe disabilities, some older people, and then just one chubby kid that can't catch real good.

I was given this award.

I couldn't catch because of the dyslexia and the asthma and the ADHD. I just had no hand eye coordination. I couldn't read ball, I couldn't catch ball, I couldn't breathe ball. It wasn't good for me, right? I won the Jack Petsy Award, is what I'm saying. I won the Jack Petschee Award, and The guy comes to my house, my cricket coach comes to my house. Now, a few facts about the story. My cricket coach is a 74-year-old man in the early 'naughties' when this happens. He comes to my house, he takes a photo of me in my front room holding the award, proudest day of my life so far. He goes away and he then He sends that photo to the editor of the newspaper. The editor of the local newspaper was a man called David Hedge. David Hedge was a 78-year-old man. The reason I'm telling you their ages isn't through any ageism. It's because in the early 'naughties', these men didn't know how emails worked. When Keith sent David the headshot of me for the newspaper, he said, David, here is Ed Hedges, our Jack Petschee award winner for this year. I'm ashamed to be sending you this photo.

As you can see, he's drastically overweight. He has multiple chins and breasts.

I know what you're thinking, but Ed, how do you know what the email said?

David Hedge saw that email and thought, Here is the photo and article for the front page of the paper. It ran for two weeks, but the scars have lasted a lifetime. The worst part about it was at the bottom of the email he sent to David Hedge, he said, Should you require a quote from Mr. Hedges? Here is his full phone number and address. For like two... And you can Google this shit. Google the Hudson, Essex Observer. Look around 2004. It's there still. Because they had my number for like two weeks, I'd get from school, and my mom would be on the phone and she'd go, Breast, darling, it's for you. I'd have to stand there and be like, Thank you for your compliment on my breasts and cricket. I didn't have a great time growing up there.

Suddenly, it's not just a comedy show, but a shared moment of human existence. I grew up in suburban Georgia, which wasn't always easy for a girl adopted from South Korea. My The experience of looking different and treated terribly in some cases is pretty unique. I mean, I was put in speech therapy classes for not sounding Southern enough. But being bullied and intimidated as a child seems to be an international language. And Ed's courage to tell his cringy stories in front of strangers, he gives us permission to laugh at our painful pasts.

When I turned 18, I started comedy and I moved away from the village. I moved to London and it changed. When I moved, I had no friends, and now I have three friends. So it was like, thank you. I didn't go back. I didn't go back to my village ever, really. My brothers both live outside of the village I'm from. I'd see my family when they'd visit my brothers. In 2015, I'm sitting in my apartment in London minding my own business. I've just got back from a gig. I've got my feet up on the table. I get a call. I get a call from our local counselor, and they call me and they say, Ed, we've seen that you're a comedian and you're doing quite well. We've seen in newspapers, on the internet, you're gigging all over the place. We want to invite you back to the village to do a charity show for us. We're building a thing for the kids at the local school and we need to raise money, so we're going to do a big show in the village hall. I thought about it and I was like, I don't like my village, but this could be a really nice experience to go and see all the people that I grew up with.

But as an adult that's gone out into the world and achieved something, I thought that'd be quite cathartic. That might be good for me. So I said, Yeah, I would love to come. I would love to perform. So on 22nd of July, 2015, I go back to the village. I get in at about 8: 00. The show's at 9: 00. But I get in and I park outside of the venue. I just sit in my car. I'm a bit I was to go in, but then I do go in and I'm scared everyone's going to be like a dick to me still, but they're lovely. And I had a brilliant time and it was great. I stuck around some drinks. I drank with my old school teacher, some people I used to know from my childhood. About half past 10: 00, I leave the gig and I've had a drink, so I leave my car at the village hall where the gig was, and I walk down the road into the village and I go to my parents' house. I haven't been there for years and years. I go down all the streets that I used to walk down as a kid, and it's lovely.

It's the best. I'm a grown up now. I've traveled the world a little bit. I've got friends. I get to my house at about half 10-ish, 20 to 11-ish. I walk up to the front door, I see the keyhole. I'm too drunk for that. See, I'm not properly smashed, but it's dark and there's no streetlights in my village, and I just couldn't be asked for this. So I walk down the side of my house. There's a big iron gate. I push open the iron gate into my garden, and I go in the back door because we never lock the back door. Most of the time, don't lock the front door. It's that village. I walk into my house, I go up to my bedroom, I lay down in my childhood bed, and I fall asleep. And that is where our story is going to start tonight. Cool.

There's shift in Ed's voice, and a moment of confusion, an awkward silence as he steers us into unknown territory. Something about his behavior felt familiar. I'd seen it before in my work. He was a ball of anxious energy, never looking up or making eye contact with anyone. The only thing he had on stage with him was a beer, no notes or setlist. His childhood stories were hilarious, if meandering, but told with such precision that you knew he'd lived them over and over in his mind. Was he just nervous to finally try out new material in front of an audience? My gut told me it wasn't that simple.

So I wake up. I wake up about 20 minutes after I fell asleep, and it's a beautiful night. It's one of the prettiest nights I've seen. The sunlight's coming in through the windows, and it's just warm. There's a breeze. It's really pleasant. I look around the room, I can see everything. I can see the desk where I wrote jokes, trying to be a comedian as a kid. I can see the little bit where I hung up my school uniform. I can see all my school textbooks that my mom has kept on the bookshop. At the end of my bed, staring out of my window, there is someone standing. It's my mom. She's standing at the end of my bed staring out the window, but I can see from the way the Moon light's hitting her face, she is terrified, more scared than I've ever seen her in my life. She's scared. She's really scared. And I go to say, Mom, what's going on? And before I can, she says the words to me, Whatever you do, do not turn on the lights.

Hey, it's Jody. As you know, we love a good mystery at Wise Crack, and I want to tell you about a podcast that we've been listening to called Wobegon. It's a story of Mike Walters, a person who stumbles into a mysterious online game. But here's the catch. This isn't just a game. It's giving Tron meets Severance with some really crazy twists and turns. Obviously, we're very big fans over here. If you like sci-fi or deep character stories, this is the pod for you. New episodes of Wobegon drop every Wednesday, each with an all-original soundtrack that pulls you even deeper into the Wobegon world. So find the show on rustyquil. Com or wobegohnpod, W-O-E-B-E-G-O-N-E, podpod. Com.

My mom, she gets confused a lot, a lot, which is why on that night when I saw her at the end of the bed, I wasn't really worried. My little village that I'm from, there's a lot-I made this recording of said several months after I first saw him on stage, but it's virtually unchanged since that night in Scotland.

The brilliance of Ed's storytelling is the second he feels the audience pulling away in fear or confusion, he brings them right back with humility and humor.

I thought she'd gotten confused, so she had no reason to say that. Our village is the quietest place in the world. It doesn't have a train station. It has one shop. It had a post office, but it literally fell down. The worst thing in our village is fucking hoodlums, bored kids. Our hoodlums are a little bit different. They're wonderful. They're just bored teenagers. They get annoyed. It's a little village called Saffron Walden. They're responsible for my favorite ever headline, which was, Hoodlums throw apples at church. Front page news, Weeks. They're brilliant. There's a group of four 11-year-old boys that call themselves the Saffron Selection, which is the best gangster name in the world, isn't it? It makes them sound like a packet of biscuits. It's brilliant. They want to be gangsters, but they don't know how. No one's ever taught them. They tried to mug me when I was a kid. They tried to mug me and they failed. See if you can spot where they ruined the mugging. A kid came up to me quite late at night and he went, Oh, Dickhead, why don't you give me your fucking money, please? No, I'm not going to do that.

You can't be a mugger with manners, can you? You can't do a drive by and then signal. That's against the rules. His friend tried to get some street cred back for his little mate, but they were posh, so he ruined it. He went, Listen, brov, don't you dare badmouth my man again? Don't you dare disrespect Sebastian? No. I'm in the room, I'm staring at my mom, and she looks terrified, and I'm thinking, Well, this isn't going to be anything serious, is it? I know Carol. I know what she's like. She's easily scared by things. I decided I'm going to go and look for my dad. My dad, John, is the silverback alpha of the family. He's very calm, he's very logical. I go out into the hallway, and it's pretty. It's a pretty night. You know when you see light and there's little specs of dust in the air and it makes everything feel a little bit magical? It had that effect. I thought that was magical until I told this story in Scotland and a woman was like, You're aware of that's dead skin? I was like, Eurk. I'm standing on the hallway. When I go to walk to my dad's bedroom, which is down the end of the house, his window overlooks the front garden, and I see him.

My dad is standing at the window. The door's open and he's shirtless. He's standing without a shirt on, hands on either side of the window, and I can see his massive back. He's got this big, strong back. He's in his 60s now, but he's still an absolute unit just from years of manual labor. He's huge. He's sweating. Heavily. He's literally the Moonlight's glistening off him and there's something different about him. It's something that I don't fully understand. My dad's a mysterious person as it is. He's a very mysterious person. He's a very quiet man. He doesn't show emotion a lot. The happiest I've ever seen him is when he got new windows for the house. That was it. He got sold in windows by an infomercial of a really angry red-face man that was like, Do you love your family and hate the French? And dad was like, Yep, yep, yep. The infomercial was like, By the Titan 17 windows. They're bulletproof, they're bomb proof. We live in the middle of nowhere. Because he's talking about them for weeks. One day I come home from school and there's a man fitting the windows. We have to get a man to fit the windows, side note, because my dad, while he is an alpha male and a physical builder farmer laborer guy, he can't do technical things.

He can't work screws. His hands are too big for screwdrivers. He ruins every DIY thing he does. He put a backdoor handle on our backdoor and he put it on upside down, which doesn't sound like a big thing. In your head, imagine every single time you go to go in the backdoor, there's a moment where you pull the handle down, it goes, chunk, and you go, That's a prick. Then you have to pull it up and go in. It really wears you down every summer. So the guy fits the windows and dad and me stand back on the lawn and he's like, Look at him. Titan 17. Glorious. They're strong, they're reliable, They're good for the family. I was like, I agree, they are the son you wish you had. On that night in front of him, when he was standing at the window looking at the front garden, I couldn't tell what he was feeling. That's scary to me because growing up, I've become an expert in this man. I know everything about him. I know the way he moves. I know the way his eyes look when he's a little bit annoyed. I have to know that because he doesn't say anything.

He never tells us anything as a family. He doesn't share a single thing. Point in case, my dad's got eight fingers, missing two fingers. One off each hand, so we didn't learn his lesson.

Until I was 17 years old, I didn't mention it.

Occasionally, I'd pass my brother on the hallway at Christmas as a kid, and I'd be like, Jack, have you seen dad's hands? He'd go, Yeah. Then we wouldn't mention dad's weird hooky hands. When I was 17, I got invited to a house party. He dropped me off. Proudest day of his life, his son was going to a house party to meet girls. He's going to be a normal boy for once. I get to the house party and I get dropped off at 8: 30. At 8: 40, I convinced myself that the pretty girls are talking about me in the garden. I cry and I'm picked up at 9: 00. We're driving home. We're driving home, me and John, in complete Silence. When I want to talk to him. I want to talk to my dad. I've had a few drinks and I'm a little bit tipsy. I just want to connect with him in some way. We don't have a lot to talk about me and John. We don't share any interest. He's a proper alpha sportsman, and I'm me, so I'm not a real man. I don't know if you can tell by the everything about me, but I don't really connect with him.

I'm trying to think of what I can say to him, and I see his hands on the steering wheel and I'm like, Ask about that. I start to think about how to ask that question because you can't just be like, What's that? Because he might have a numb flashback and we'll end up in a ditch. I'm thinking about how you ask that question, how you word that without triggering him, how you'd be respectful to any potential trauma that he has. I'm trying to think this over and he sees me fidgeting in my seat and he goes, What the fuck is wrong with you, Edward? I panicked and said, Where have your fingers gone, John?

It's not how you ask that question, guys.

He said, I cut them off, and I went, and we didn't talk about it again. Didn't talk about it again. Didn't talk about it again. Doesn't share anything. Doesn't tell anyone anything. Never let anyone in. Never show weakness. Keep your own shit to yourself, do your job, work hard, pay for your family, die. That's his thing. Get windows and you're done. That's all he worries about. He just doesn't let us know anything. I'm staring at him on the hallway. And then I hear the banging. It's coming from the front door. It's the loudest thing I've ever heard in my life. It's literally vibrating up through the banister where I stand at the top of the stairs. It scares me at first. It scares me really badly. But I think about it. I think about it, logically. It's roughly the time the pubs close. I've just done a show in town. It's probably a drunk guy that's been like, I want to speak to Ed. And he's come to the front door. He's banging on the door. My parents are getting on a bit. They're probably a bit scared. They're probably just a bit worried about who it could be.

So they're looking out the window. They're not used to this. What I'll do, I'll go downstairs, I'll answer the door. I'll be like, Mate, go away. This is too noisy. So start to walk down the stairs. I get three steps down and my dad's hand comes over the banister, grabs me by the scraff of the neck, pins me against the wall, and he leans into my ear and he says, Do not move and do not make a sound. He's holding me so tightly against the wall, I can hear the plaster board behind me start to crack. And he would do this a lot. His anger was... It was bad. It was really bad. That temper just comes out of nowhere. A lot of the times his outbursts were silly little things. Sometimes they were a lot more severe, and that would be bad. I missed a lot of school as a kid because I had black eyes, bust lips, cut eyebrows, bruises on my back, broke my hand. It was bad. It was difficult. My dad had this thing. Whenever he'd have an outburst, he'd always make pancakes the next day. It sounds silly, but it's the only meal he knows how to make, and he didn't want to have to say sorry because then he has to acknowledge what he did.

If he did something bad, the next morning, he'd wake up at 5: 00 AM, make a load of pancakes, leave them on the table. I'd wake up in the morning, I'd eat them. Everything will be fine. That was the thing. If you eat the pancakes, everything is fine. Unwritten rule. I had to be so smart. He didn't express his emotions. He didn't tell anyone anything, so you had to read everything he did. I'm an expert in the man, is what I'm trying to say. I'm an expert in the man. I had to be.

Suddenly, behind all the sarcasm and wit, you can see the young chubby boy, physically and mentally terrified by the men who inhabit his childhood. His bully, his friends, even his own of father couldn't recognize his gentle spirit, and you can't help but feel for him.

And the reason I'm telling you these stories is because I need you to know I couldn't tell what was happening. I'm confused because he's not angry. He's pinning me against the wall and he's not angry at all. I can't tell what he is. Mom comes out of my room and she says, John, put him down. He lets go of me. I slide down the wall. I stand up and I walk into a little bit teary-eyed, a little bit shaken up. I shut the door behind me in my room and I think, right, what has happened here? Banging's ringing through the house. Whoever's in the front garden, whatever's in the front garden. At this stage, I don't know how many people, how many things, what it could be. But my dad is looking at it and he won't go downstairs. It doesn't make sense. So I think, right, I'm going to call the police. I'll find out what's going on. The way the police work in our village, because it's quite small, we have one police officer that drives around all the villages all the time and basically just looks after farming matters, to be honest.

A farmer will call up and be like, There's a ghost in my garden and it's a sheet and everything's fine. I call the police, it rings a couple of times, someone answers. I said, Hey, my name's Ed. I'm calling from 40 Benfield Avenue. Someone's banging on our front door. I think is a drunk, but my parents are acting really weird, and it's shaking me up. Could you send an officer down just to check this out? The person on the other end of the phone says, I'm sorry, where did you say you were calling from? I said, 40 Bentfield Avenue, just in South London. The officer says, Mr. Hedges, we are very aware of the situation. Please barricade yourself inside the house and do not engage with anyone you meet. And then they hang up.

This season on Wise Crack.

I never told people the name. I never wanted to invite people to the village. The thing that struck me most about it was the sheer quantity of bloodshed. It literally was a blood bath. That doesn't sound like a police officer. It doesn't sound He was a police officer to me. He didn't do that. So when I found out what happened, it was more, holy shit, he did it. And he got really defensive and was like, Oh, you don't trust me. And I was like, That sounds like what liars do when they're caught out on a lie. I don't understand what happened to trigger that guy because he was hyperactive, but he wasn't a killer. Get all your knives, all the sharp knives, and put them away. Put them somewhere else. This is one of those things where you take my word or you don't.

So you're saying this isn't safe? I personally would not go there, or please bring someone with you. Episode 2 will release next week, but you can binge the rest of the season right now completely ad-free by subscribing to Tenderfoot Plus on Apple Podcasts or at tenderfootplus. Com.