The Elf Cleric: The Menhaz Zaman Murders

The Elf Cleric: The Menhaz Zaman Murders

At approximately 10 o'clock on the evening of Saturday the 27th of July 2019, a 23-year-old man in the Toronto suburb of Markham, Ontario, logged in to a private chat server on the messaging app Discord and began, in real time, to type a message that would be seen, over the course of the following 18 hours, by dozens of video gamers scattered across the world. His name was Menhaz Zaman. His username was Menhaz. His avatar, in the online video game he had played for years, was an elf cleric. The message he began to type read, in the plain lowercase style he typically used: "I killed mom and granny so far, waiting for sister in 5 minutes and dad in 1 hour." The other players initially assumed it was a joke. Then he sent a photograph. Over the following 18 hours, he would post a running commentary of a quadruple homicide, along with an explanation of why he was doing it. For three years, he had been telling his parents he was studying mechanical engineering at York University. He was not. He had dropped out of a lesser college after two semesters. He had told them his graduation was scheduled for Sunday the 28th of July 2019. As the deadline approached, and the lie became impossible to sustain, he decided instead to kill his mother, his grandmother, his 21-year-old sister, and his 59-year-old taxi-driving father, so that they would never have to discover the truth about who their son had become. The story of a three-year deception, a quadruple homicide committed over nine hours, an extraordinary international manhunt conducted by video gamers on a Discord server, and a Tunisian stranger who picked up the phone to Toronto Police to try to save two lives. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here [linktr.ee/one_minute_remaining] Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE [https://www.youtube.com/@CrimeAtBedtimeOfficial] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

The Family Court Bomber: Leonard Warwick

On the morning of Wednesday the 29th of July 2015, New South Wales Police homicide detectives arrested a 68-year-old retired firefighter at his home in the south-western Sydney suburb of Campbelltown. His name was Leonard John Warwick. The charges laid against him ran to 32 offences, including four counts of murder, one count of attempted murder, and thirteen counts of causing bodily harm or property damage with an explosive substance. The offences dated back to a five-year period between February 1980 and July 1985. For 35 years, the state of New South Wales had known who it thought was responsible for one of the most sustained campaigns of politically motivated violence in modern Australian history. For 35 years, it had not been able to prove it. Over those five years in the early 1980s, a sitting judge of the newly established Family Court of Australia had been shot to death at his own front door. A judge's wife had been killed by a bomb on the doorstep of her home. A Jehovah's Witness minister had been killed, along with thirteen others injured, by a bomb detonated at a Kingdom Hall in south-western Sydney. And a young Family Court judge, along with his wife and two children, had narrowly survived a bomb that exploded outside their bedroom in the middle of the night. At the centre of every one of the incidents, in police files as thick as any built on a single individual outside the organised crime bureau, was the same name. A firefighter. An aggrieved former husband. A man who had been given visitation rights instead of custody of his infant daughter by a Family Court judge in 1979, and who had spent the following five years answering the court's decisions with bombs. The story of how one man's disappointment in a Sydney courtroom on a summer afternoon in 1979 led to the deaths of four people, the injury of dozens, and a 35-year manhunt that finally ended with three life sentences and the last decade of his life spent in prison. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here [linktr.ee/one_minute_remaining] Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE [https://www.youtube.com/@CrimeAtBedtimeOfficial] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Wow!: The Signal from Sagittarius

On the evening of Monday the 15th of August 1977, in a field outside the small town of Delaware, Ohio, a radio telescope the size of three football fields was listening to the sky. There were no astronomers present. The telescope could not be steered. It sat on the ground, pointed straight up, and let the rotation of the Earth do its work for it. As the planet turned, patches of the night sky drifted, slowly, across its stationary field of view. At approximately 22:16 that evening, the telescope was scanning a patch of sky in the constellation Sagittarius. At that moment, a signal reached it. It was narrow. It was strong. It was almost exactly at 1420 megahertz, which is the natural emission frequency of neutral hydrogen. The hydrogen line. The frequency that in 1959, two physicists at Cornell University had predicted, in the pages of the journal Nature, would be the exact frequency that any alien civilisation trying to contact humanity would logically choose. The signal rose in intensity over 36 seconds. It peaked at approximately 30 times the background noise of the surrounding cosmos. Then it fell in intensity over the following 36 seconds. And then, at 22:17, it was gone. Three days later, a former physics professor named Jerry Ehman, working at the observatory as an unpaid volunteer, sat down at his desk to review the printouts. He found a vertical column of numbers and letters that made him take his red ballpoint pen, circle the sequence, and write, in the margin, a single word. Wow! It is, as of 2026, the closest thing that any radio telescope on Earth has ever recorded to the exact kind of signal that scientists have, since 1959, expected an alien civilisation to send. It has never, in the 48 years since it was detected, been observed again. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here [linktr.ee/one_minute_remaining] Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE [https://www.youtube.com/@CrimeAtBedtimeOfficial] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

The Boot on the Beach: The Killing of Antonio Neill

On the afternoon of Tuesday the 1st of January 2019, a group of beachcombers walking along Jetty Island, a small sandy island in the estuary off Everett, Washington, found a black Timberland work boot half-buried in the sand. It had been in the water for some time. The leather was waterlogged, the laces crusted with silt. Inside the boot was a human foot. Within days, DNA testing had matched the foot to a 22-year-old man from Everett who had been missing for exactly 25 months. His name was Antonio Jordan Neill. On the evening of the 12th of December 2016, Antonio had been picked up from his mother's house by a friend, and taken to an address in the 2400 block of Cedar Street. His mother, Jenny, watched him leave. It was the last time she would ever see him alive. According to the friend, there had been a physical altercation. According to the friend, Antonio had fled the house. Investigators later found blood in multiple locations in the friend's bedroom - on the carpet, on a wall, on the mattress, on the window sill. The blood, when it was tested, did not match Antonio. The friend passed a polygraph. No charges were ever filed. And for two years, until the boot washed ashore on New Year's Day 2019, no one knew what had happened to Antonio Neill. The story of a young man who left his mother's house one December evening in Everett, Washington, and never came home. Of the two years his mother spent putting his face on fliers, on billboards, and in front of any reporter who would listen. And of the black Timberland boot that washed up on a beach on New Year's Day 2019, and finally gave her the terrible answer she had been waiting for. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here [linktr.ee/one_minute_remaining] Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE [https://www.youtube.com/@CrimeAtBedtimeOfficial] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Missing: Madeleine McCann

On the evening of Thursday the 3rd of May 2007, a British couple on holiday in the resort of Praia da Luz on Portugal's Algarve coast finished dinner with friends at a tapas restaurant, roughly 50 metres from the ground-floor apartment where their three children were sleeping. Kate and Gerry McCann had, over the course of the evening, taken turns checking on the children at approximately half-hour intervals. Their eldest daughter, three-year-old Madeleine, was in the front bedroom with her two-year-old twin siblings. At approximately 10:00 pm, Kate McCann returned to Apartment 5A of the Ocean Club resort for her turn to check. She walked through the unlocked patio door. She looked into the children's bedroom. The twins were still asleep. Madeleine's bed was empty. The window in the room was open. Nineteen years later, Madeleine McCann has never been found. Portuguese police initially treated the case as an abduction, then as a homicide, then closed it, then reopened it. Kate and Gerry McCann were themselves named as formal suspects, then cleared. Multiple men have been investigated over the years, including a German convicted paedophile named Christian Brueckner, who remains the primary suspect of German prosecutors. The case has generated more media coverage than any missing child case in modern European history. The story of the little girl who vanished from Apartment 5A, of the parents whose lives were destroyed by the search for her, and of a mystery that, at the time of this recording, has still never been solved. Become a Patreon or Apple + subscriber now for ealry and ad free access from as little as $1.69 a week. All the details here [linktr.ee/one_minute_remaining] Subscribe to Crime at Bedtimes Youtube channel HERE [https://www.youtube.com/@CrimeAtBedtimeOfficial] ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.