Transcript of Police Interview conducted by Det. Alec Saltzmann Date: 2/13/20 Subject: Davis Marks
So Mr. Marks, my understanding is that you have been waiting out there for two hours. Insisted on talking to a detective, is that right?
That’s right.
Sir, you understand that our patrol officers are perfectly capable of taking statements and reports?
Maybe, but I didn’t want to risk it. This needs to be dealt with now. I don’t have time to go through multiple people, and you’re going to want to hear what I have to say.
You are recording this, right?
Yessir. Audio on the table, and that camera up there is always going. So let’s do this, okay? I got pulled off a robbery to listen to your story, so get to it please.
Fine. Yeah, okay. So, I killed someone last week.
(A pause)
I see. Okay. Who did you kill?
Well, that’s the thing. I’m not sure any more. Let me explain.
My best friend Mike and I have been roommates for the last five years. We met junior year of college, and when we graduated, we decided to stick together. He…he was a really good guy. I say was because, about six months ago, he killed himself.
I should have seen it coming. He’d gotten involved with this girl online. That had started over a year ago. They talked through chat at first, then emails. Eventually they started talking on the phone, though I never spoke to her or even heard her voice. For a long time we didn’t talk about it, and I kind of assumed it was just something he was doing to pass the time until he got another real girlfriend.
But then I could tell it was getting more serious. He was sinking more and more of his time into his online and phone life with her, and before long he started talking about her more openly. Telling me he had real feelings for her, that he was saving up the money to go and finally visit her. He had shown me her online profile—pictures and stuff. She was really hot, I’m not going to lie. And he was happier than I’d seen him in awhile, so I was all for it.
For a few weeks, that’s the way things stayed. He was getting close to the money he needed for a plane ticket and expenses while he visited her, and I could see his excitement and nervousness building. It was all he could talk about most of the time.
Then one day, I came home and he had hung himself.
He’d apparently gotten word from Audrey’s brother…that was the girl’s name, Audrey…that she had been killed in a car accident the night before. The brother had been going through Audrey’s phone looking for people he should contact and that’s when he’d realized she and Mike were in some kind of online relationship, so he’d contacted Mike to let him know the bad news.
I…I’ve seen Mike’s phone myself. After the police turned it over to his family, his Mom let me look at it. I saw the texts and then the phone calls between Mike and Audrey’s brother on the day Mike killed himself. I saw the texts and chats and emails between Mike and Audrey in the days before. They…fuck, they talked like they were in love with each other. I’d known it was getting serious, but…well, I suddenly had a better idea why Mike had done what he did, as terrible as it was.
Maybe it should’ve given me some kind of peace. Or at least something to blame other than myself. But all it really did was make me angry. Angry at this poor dead girl I’d never met and never would now. Angry at her brother for telling Mike the things that caused him to tie a rope around his neck and kick the chair away.
I…I struggled with that anger for awhile. Tried to let it go, but I couldn’t. So eventually I…well, I started kind of cyberstalking him. I haunted his social media. He seemed like a regular guy, but that didn’t matter to me. He was still alive, going to parties, posting photos of dinners and comments about movies he had seen, and meanwhile Mike was buried in a family plot outside of Minneapolis. It fucking sucked.
Still, by last month, my grief and guilt had started to fade, or if not that, at least I was used to it and it didn’t occupy my thoughts so much. I’d gone from checking out the brother’s pages multiple times a day to once a day to a couple of times a week. But then, one night when I was bored and lonely, I decided to see what the fucker had been up to.
I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary at first. But then I saw his account had been tagged in some woman’s photo. I clicked on the photo, and it was a picture of a beautiful, smiling woman holding a glass of champagne and wearing a sparkly, pink party hat shaped like one of those old-fashioned bowlers. And it…it was Audrey.
At first I thought it was just an old photo someone had posted and tagged on his account somehow. But then I realized what kind of party she was at. I could tell from the decorations and the funny hats and glasses people were wearing in the background that it was a New Years’ Eve party. And the things people were wearing all said 2020.
But Audrey had supposedly died in August of 2019.
I followed the photo’s link back to the original account then. It didn’t go to Audrey’s account. It went to a girl named Melissa. A girl named Melissa that looked just like Audrey and, based on her recent postings, was very much alive. Going back through her old posts, I even found one where she talked about her brother Simon—the same Simon Winders I’d been cyberstalking for months.
So it’s twins, right? Audrey had a twin sister named Melissa and I’d found her account. Simple enough.
Except the more I looked, the more I realized there was no mention of Audrey anywhere. No mention of her life or her death. No photos of the hypothetical twin sisters together, or with their brother either. I went back through Audrey’s old social media, then back through her brother’s again. Nowhere could I find anyone talking about Audrey and Melissa in the same breath or ever referencing that there were twins at all. What I did find, however, was several instances of the same photo…the exact same photo, being used by Audrey and Melissa as supposedly being a photo of themselves.
That’s when I contacted my ex. She’s IT for a big company in New York now, and once she heard how upset I was, she agreed to look into it. See if she could find any patterns or anything I didn’t know to look for. She said if she saw signs of anything sketchy, she’d give me a call.
Three days later, I heard from her.
She said she couldn’t say for sure, but she thought Mike had been catfished. When I asked what that was, she said it meant that someone had made a fake online person to trick people. Some did it as part of a con, others did it as a prank or just to be mean. But best she could tell, there were four different profiles of women on various parts of the internet that all matched Audrey physically. They used some of the same photos, though their “personalities” and personal info were all fairly different. All of them did have one other thing in common, however.
They all had ties back to Simon Winders.
When I pressured her, she gave me his physical address. Last Friday, I flew out there. This was out in a suburb of Detroit. Small little shitbox house in a rundown neighborhood. Beater car in the driveway. Not some rich internet genius or a supervillain. Just a shitty guy with a shitty life wanting to hurt people.
I swear I went there just to talk to him. Scream at him, sure, maybe threaten him with the police. Make him feel ashamed or at least scared.
But when he opened the door, it was like he already knew. Hell, maybe he did. Mike may have sent Audrey pics of me, which meant he’d really been sending pics to Simon. And when he opened that fucking door…he just grinned. Grinned and invited me in. Like he’d been expecting me, or at least like it was a good surprise.
I’d had a speech in my head. All the things I was going to tell him. Accuse him of. Make him sorry for what he had done. I started into it, and at first he just listened silently, propped casually against the wall in the front hall of his house like I was trying to sell him insurance and he was too polite to kick me out just yet.
But then he started to laugh. To fucking laugh. The worst part was, I could tell he was actually trying not to. He was fighting it because he wanted to hear more of my tearful, impotent rage. But he couldn’t help himself, because it was so fucking funny.
I beat him to death. I don’t remember every moment of it, but I remember that I did it. Partially with my hands, partially with a wooden chair he had in the living room. It wasn’t until near the end, as the chair was breaking in my hands and my arms were slick with blood, that I realized he had changed. Not just because of how I had broken him either. He looked smaller…more slender…more…
I dropped what was left of the chair and staggered back. Simon wasn’t there any more. It was now obviously a woman, and more than that, I could tell even with the blood and the damage that it was the woman that Mike had been in love with. Audrey, Melissa, Janine, Sarah, all of them the same, all of them Simon, all of them lying dead on the floor.
It was then that I heard a creak from the far end of the hall. I looked up the stairs and saw a pair of eyes staring back at me. It was a child, or it looked like a child from its size and shape. All I could see were its strange, faintly glowing eyes staring down at me from the shadows. All I could hear was the muffled, snotty sounds of it softly crying over what I had done.
I ran. I ran, and I cleaned myself up at a rest stop, and then I got a motel room and waited for the cops to show up. When they hadn’t by the next day, I flew back home. It’s been days now, and I’ve heard nothing. There’s no news reports of a man or woman being killed at that house. No trace of a police investigation or search for a killer. I even called 911 anonymously on Monday out of fear that child was just stuck in that house with their dead…parent, I guess. But assuming they checked, there’s been no sign of a child being found at a murder scene either.
In fact, for days the only way I could tell it had happened at all…other than my own terrible memories…was that there were no new updates on any of their social media. Simon, Audrey, all the rest…they’d gone silent as a tomb. But even with that, I was starting to doubt myself. Maybe I had imagined it or dreamt it. Maybe I had a brief psychotic break even. I went out for the first time Tuesday, and that’s when I first saw it watching me.
It looked like a small boy, about seven or eight. Just sitting outside my house staring at me. I noticed the child, sure, but at the time I didn’t think much of it. I just got in my car and drove to the store.
But then I saw the same boy staring at me from the far end of the cereal aisle. And then a girl of the same age, wearing the same hooded, burgundy coat, watching me as I loaded the groceries into my car. By then I had seen them enough that I knew what was happening.
It was the eyes, you see. I recognized its eyes. They weren’t glowing any more, but they still stared into me accusingly, patiently. Telling me they knew what I had done.
And that I would pay the price.
I didn’t go home that night. I went to a hotel two towns over. I even drove around in circles for awhile first, trying to throw anyone off my trail. It didn’t matter. When I looked out my window late that night, I saw the little boy at the edge of the parking lot, looking up at me as though he’d been waiting for hours right in that spot. Maybe he had.
I…I need help. Protection. I’ll confess to what I did. Go and check it out. You’re bound to find something unless they covered it all up. Just…Just keep me in here. Keep me safe. Please.
Son, are you under the influence of something?
No, Goddamn it! I’m telling you the truth! Just look…
Hold your horses. We’ll look into it. It’ll take a bit, but if you don’t mind sitting, we’ll look into it. Ah…Assuming we do find something, are you good with giving a more detailed statement under Miranda?
Sure, whatever it takes. Just keep me in here. Keep that thing away from me.
Yeah, yeah. You’re safe. Don’t worry. Just a minute. Kid, come here. I need you to babysit this one for a few. What’s your name?
(Mumbled response outside of the room)
Well, Officer Janus, if you don’t mind keeping our friend here company for a few minutes, I’m going to go make some calls. Back in a few minutes, sir.
At this point, the video and audio simultaneously stop recording for some undetermined reason. Based upon Det. Saltzmann’s account, he left the subject with a patrol officer that had identified himself as Officer Janus. When he returned to the interview room twenty minutes later, there was no sign of Janus or Davis Marks.
There is no record of a patrol officer by the name of Janus working for the department. Saltzmann said he’d never seen the man before, but just assumed he was new, given his uniform and location in a secure area of the office. Attempts to locate Janus and Marks have been unsuccessful. Attempts to find any reported incidents around Detroit matching Marks’ account have also failed to produce any results.
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