The School of Humans to be honest with views.
It happened so fast, and I mean I just woke up to him banging in my house saying that he just got shot. And the hell, my whole.
Porch just covered in blood right now, I mean, he was just covered in blood.
On July thirtieth, twenty twenty, in Stark County, Indiana, a nine to one to one call came from North County Road ten to twenty five East just before three thirty am. The caller had worked late that night. He had gotten home and climbed into bed when he said that he and his fiancee were woken up by someone pounding on their door. The man was twenty seven year old Nicholas Rudd. Nick said that he had been shot, but neither the
caller nor his fiancee had hurt any gunshots. What the caller didn't know was that Nick had not been shot. He had been attacked with a hammer and stabbed in the neck. He was bleeding to death on their door step, and the killer was still outside.
I'm Catherine Townsend.
Over the past five years of making my true crime podcast, Helen Gone, I've learned that there is no such thing as a small town where murder never happens. I have received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families, and their communities. If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder line at six seven eight seven four four six one
four five. That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five, or you can send us a message on Instagram at Helen Gonepod. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. So the caller refused to let Nick inside the house. Understandably, they wanted to help, but they were also afraid and wanted to assess the situation first, so they called nine one one, but by the time nine one one got there, Nick was gone. Nick ran to another neighbor's house. Now by this time Nick was bleeding to death. When he
got to another neighbor's home, he collapsed. The neighbor ran out into her porch and tried to help him, while also calling nine one one and putting towels over Nick's wounds. While she tried to render first aid. She told the dispatcher that she was talking to Nick. The dispatcher asked the caller to keep talking to him, to ask who shot him?
Okay? Can he answer you?
Yes?
Okay?
Who shot.
He says he can't breathe.
Okay?
Did he say who shot him?
Honey?
That's I need to know, he said, She said, a bald guy.
It's very hard to hear.
Nick is gasping for air, but the caller was able to get him to say that his name was Nicholas, and Nick said a bald guy had shot him. He died before the paramedics arrived. Police rushed to the scene and quickly realized that Nick had not been shot. He had actually been stabbed. He had defensive wounds on his right arm and a fatal stab wound to his neck. After that s woon, he would have bled out in minutes. But who would want to kill Nick?
And why?
Nick was twenty seven years old, and though we had a troubled past and became involved with drugs in high school, he had seemed to be trying to get to a better place. He grew up in North Judson, Indiana. It's suburban with a population of about twelve hundred, and like any small town, it's somewhere where everyone seems to know each other, but it's also a place that has had its share of property crimes, drugs, and violence. We talked to Nick's friend Cliff Gosh.
I met Nick in fifth or fourth grade. Yeah, I think he just came back from moved back from Georgia.
And we met. We got along pretty much right away, and.
We were friends for probably the good part of like ten years, probably best friends all the way through high school. We were pretty much inseparable, everything from like playing guitar and chasing girls, you know, going to party. You know, it's just the high school kids. I think we were safe havings for each other for a lot of things in high school. I know, he had like a really crappy upbringing, and.
You know, he would come to stay and me with me and my dad for like a week at a time, you know.
So we were super close, and then we had a bit of a falling out because he was doing bad stuff.
Cliff said that during high school, Nick got into drugs, beginning with marijuana and then eventually methamphetamines. Nick also got involved in crime, and Cliff believed some of those early decisions changed Nick's life Eventually, Cliff said that Nick stole Cliff's father's identity, which led to Nick being arrested and convicted of forgery in twenty eleven. According to court records, he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison.
Yeah, that was pretty much out of our relationship. I didn't talk to him, So we didn't talk for like six years.
Nick had been in a relation relationship with the mother of his daughter, and when he got out, the relationship ended acrimoniously after a custody battle. Nick's family said that he no longer saw his daughter. Then he got married to Destiny in twenty fourteen. His family said that she was a very good influence on Nick. They had two sons together, and for a while life was good.
It looked like.
His life had started to turn around. Cliff said that he actually ran into Nick just a few days before he died.
It's it was difficult because we had you done so much for each other. I know, like he's made bad decisions or whatever, but like I always wanted to be his friend, to be there for him.
So when I seen him, he was like, hey, man, like you know, you know I'm doing good.
We should hang out, play some guitar, and I kind of just say, you know, I don't know, it's still kind of I was almost there, but not lay there, and it's a little I get hold of them.
So that was after them, But those times didn't last. A few months before he died, Nick and his wife Destiny, separated. Since he was no longer living at home, he started staying on and off with friends, including a guy named Brandon Combs. On the night he was killed, Nick was hanging out about half a mile away with his sister Stephanie. Stephanie, by the way, knew Brandon from way back. Also, like I said, it's a small town. Nick was planning on
going back to Brandon's. At this point, he'd been staying at Brandon's for a few weeks. Stephanie said that she was texting back and forth with Brandon to ask when he would be home, and that finally, I think around three am, Brandon texted back to say that he was there at his house. So Stephanie drove Nick there. When they got there, she went in Brandon's house with Nick.
And so when we went down there, I was out of milk at the house, so I got.
Some milk from Brandon and I just made sure.
I told him to make sure Nicholas got to say, you know, he needed to get to sleep, not to little leave or go with anybody. And he was I mean, he acted normal to me. But like I said, I was using at the time. But as far as I can remember, Brandon act was perfectly normal. The only weird thing is get a huge TV in his room, and that's where that him and Nicholas were at, and he had all of his degree cameras put up on the you know, they were pulled up so you could see every angle of the house.
Stephanie left minutes later, and then a few minutes after that, the killer approached the house with a hammer in one hand and a spearlike object in the other. Police quickly figured out the killer kicked the door of Brandon's house down. Brandon and Nick ran out the back. Nick was carrying the hammer when he left the house, so obviously he fought his killer, and then the killer continued to chase
him to the neighbor's house. That's where he was stabbed in the neck, which ended up being the fatal wound. He also had a defensive wound on his upper right arm, which he probably sustained while fighting for his life. Brandon's house in the neighbor's houses quickly became crime scenes. After police checked security cameras, they found that Brandon's house did have a camera outside the front door. Unfortunately, there was no footage of the fatal attack, but there was footage of the killer.
Lieutenant Calea.
Miller described the footage and said, quote, just before that nine to one one call was made, there was a male suspect seen kicking in the door of the home and it appears that the suspect is armed with a hammer and bladed object. He gains entry, we see Nick run out. He is being chased running toward the house where they called nine one one end quote. This footage has not been shown to the public, but Nick's mother, Michelle, and sister Stephanie were allowed to view it at the police station.
So you see Nick running out of the house.
Nick runs off the porch and he runs into the grass that you can't see him because he run into the house next door. It is a thirty or forty five seconds time before this guy comes out of the house after Nick, a good thirty to forty five seconds, and Nick when he comes out before this guy. He's got the hammer whatever it is, in his hand. I'm sure he fought with the guy. You more or less see the time of the image in the light itself.
Walking along the road is Brandon's house. From the porch to the road was not even thirty forty feet something like that, so Nick, of course the guy was looking for Nick.
Nick was hiding.
Michelle talked to local media and the police. Eventually the police did release an image to the public. They gave it crime stoppers and hope that someone might see something something that would be able to help solve the case. The photograph was taken on night vision and for red camera, so it's very blown out. Everything looks white, but it appears as though the killer was wearing a dark colored
possibly a black suit and hoodie. And just thinking back to what Nick said about a bald man shooting him, the killer may have been bald, but in the image, he also looked as if he could have been wearing something that covered his hair, possibly a ball of clava, and it looks like he may even have a mask covering his face. It's just really hard to tell due to the lighting. He also seemed to have on some
sort of protective goggles. By the way, I'm saying he because the police have described the suspect as male, obviously we don't know for sure. It does appear to be a male, but that's really all we know. Because the killer was in disguise, we also know he was carrying a hammer in one hand and something else in the other.
We talked to the detective in charge the investigation, who confirmed that the killer was holding a homemade weapon of some kind, some type of spear attached to what appeared to be a cattle prod.
Stephanie is very.
Open about the fact that at the time her brother died, she was a heroin dealer, and she revealed that Nick had also recently begun using heroin. His drug usage was one of the reasons he and his wife, Destiny separated. But besides Stephanie and Nick, Stephanie said almost no one else knew that he was using heroin. Along with the footage from the first caller's front door, police also found video of the front of Brandon's house taken from a
doorbell camera. Again, they have not made this footage public, but Michelle and Stephanie have seen it, and they described what they saw to us. The footage shows stephanielling up to Brandon's at around three fifteen am, and then Nick getting out of the car. They both went inside the house for a few minutes. Then the video shows Stephanie going back to her car alone and her vehicle leaving. Then just minutes later, the killer approaches the door. But
we don't know where the killer came from. Did he drive there, did he park somewhere or with someone else driving a getaway car. Nick's family finds the timing suspicious. They wonder how did the killer know to come to Brandon's house right after Stephanie left. Stephanie said that due to her drug dealing, she changed vehicles frequently. She said that only a few people knew what kind of car she would be in that night. Was this a coincidence or they wonder could it have been some kind of setup?
In that video, right before the killer arrived, Michelle said she could see a car passing Brandon's house. She wondered, could this be the killer?
This car drives by really and you can't it's black and white. You can't see the car. You see the lights, you see the headlights, So it passes the house and it probably goes down from just what we gather because.
Of the guy walking up to the back porch.
He probably goes down and then somebody gets out whatever, and then there's a little side road, and so within a few minutes you see this guy walking up to the deck.
Brandon had like patio doors.
They were glassed, which is what is another strange thing to me, That you're in the back and not facing the road. You're in the back of the house. He wanted to break in, Right, there's your patio doors. You're looking through them. Then the guy looks heard of the camera.
In the video, the killer approaches the house and then kicks the door down and walks inside. About forty five seconds later, by Michelle and Stephanie's descriptions, you can see Brandon coming around from the back of the house. He apparently crawled out of a window and Nick followed him. After they got out of the house, the video shows them taking off in separate directions. Nick ran toward the first caller's house and Brandon, well, it's not clear where he goes.
Police found him the next day.
They didn't find him until like three or four o'clock that next afternoon.
Oh where did he go.
He supposedly fell asleep at a ditch bank, that's what he said. When they finally found him, he told a story that he climbed out the window, which is a coward, and he said that Nick was behind him, because when the guy comes up to the porch and kicks the door down, So when the guy goes to the back then you don't see him. But then he comes up to the front porch, of course, and he kicks the door for five or six times at least. Yes, he takes his leg and he's kicking this door.
A lot of rumors were flying around after Nick's death, but everyone seemed to agree on one thing. They believed that the killing had been a hit, that someone went there that night because they were targeting someone at that house, probably nicko commenting on these rumors on social media, and there were even comments about potential suspects on Nick's obituary, asking about two people whose names we keep hearing. We will call them Jay and h their first initials because
they have not been arrested or charged with anything. In fact, no one has been arrested or charged at all in connection with Nick Rudd's murder. Jay was Michelle's cousin, Stephanie, said that she believed Nick had been spending time with Jay's girlfriend. Jay was much older in his fifties, while his girlfriend was closer to Nick's. Ah H was a younger friend of Jay's, so there is a rumor that Nick may have been involved in a love triangle with Jay.
But another mode of.
People mentioned was drugs, that Nick might owe money to someone for drugs. In fact, Michelle said that one of the last texts that Nick sent her involved a drug debt to Jay.
And one of the texts that he had sent Nick one probably the last text that he sent Nick was you know about if he get paid, He's get a killing.
So drug debts do seem like they could be a possible motive, but something police told Nick's family made them believe money was not the motive.
Here.
The police recovered nick wallet from his body and it had five hundred dollars in it, So if money was the motive, surely the killers would have taken that cash. And in talking to local sources, we have not so far found any evidence of a big drug debt. It appears that the debt that Nick o Jay was around one hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars, which doesn't seem on the surface like an amount that would cause someone to take the risk to kill.
After Nick Rudd was.
Murdered, rumors were flying about possible people of interest, people who supposedly had recent conflicts with Nick. But there were more and more rumors flying around, one involving a love triangle. So might there have been another reason why Jay would have wanted to hurt Nick. As rumors were flying around Stark County, Indiana, online commenters and Nick's family started suspecting a couple of different motives involving Jay. One that was seeming less and less likely was money. The other was
a love triangle. Stephanie said that Jay had a girlfriend and that Nick was in some way involved with this woman. If this is true, it could have made Jay or someone who knew Jay angry. Jay is apparently older, in his fifties, but people who have seen the photo and no Jay have told us that Jay has a very distinctive look, and everyone who has seen the photos agreed the killer looks like a much younger man and also
just does not seem to match Jay's description. So Nick's family wonders if Jay could have possibly hired someone to target Nick. One theory discussed was that Jay and ten for his hip man to just beat Nick up or scare him, but then Nick surprised the killer by grabbing the hammer and fighting back. I want to back up a bit and talk about some misconceptions about hit men, or to be less sexist, I could say hired assassins, but just know when I say hit man, I mean
hit man and hit women when we see movies. Normally, these assassins are glamorous James Vond style figures like villain l and Killing Eve, or professionals who are quirky like John Cusack and Gross point blank.
But the reality is very different.
And as someone who handles a lot of fraud cases from my other podcast, Red Collar, I know that most hit men are not like that normally. Very often they're low level gangsters who carry out hits for very little money, a lot of four and five figure amounts, and they tend to make a lot of mistakes because when you hire hit man, you get what you pay for. Also, a lot of times people who want to kill someone will hire one of these low rent hit men, and to do that they go to their circle of friends.
Now this means there is more loyalty there, but it's also big problem because there is a connection between the person who hired the assassin and the assassin. They are friends, they hang out together, and if one of them gets busted by the police, likely sold the other one. There was a study in twenty fourteen by Birmingham City University in the UK. The professor who ran the study told
NBC News quote, these images are Hollywood eyes. The hit man seems like quite an attractive image that people are responding to. They are professional, very confident, hyper masculine.
End quote. He goes on to explain that that's a total myth.
The professor said, these hits are not taking place in internationally glamorous locations like casinos. They're happening while people are out walking their dogs or coming home from the grocery store. He said, quote, the hits were not in the underworld. They were in the overworld, and usually with passers by as witnesses looking on in abject horror.
End quote.
He had some other interesting statistics that I'll share just because I am actually fascinated by this stuff. He said, Tuesday is the most common day of the week for a hit. March, May and July are the most common months, and the average cost of killing someone is just over twenty five thousand dollars. The highest payout he saw was one hundred and sixty eight thousand dollars, but this was back in twenty fourteen, so it might.
Have gone up since then.
I do find the dark part of myself wondering, as someone who studies this stuff, if hit man are affected by inflation. The study broke hitman down into four types. Type one they called the novice. This is the inexperienced killer like someone's high school cousin, or the very young gang members send out in a hit because he's probably too young to be prosecuted, at least that's what the other members believe. The second type is called the diletant. This is the type of hit man who doesn't really
want to go through with a hit. When I think of the diletant type, I think of the Robert Marshall case is a great example of this. This guy was living in Tom's River, New Jersey. He wanted to kill his wife Maria because he was living way beyond his means and having an affair. He couldn't afford to divorce Maria, so we hired a hit man from Louisiana. But the hit man, for a long time just kept taking Robert
Marshall's money and blowing him off. Because it turned out he actually had a lot of sympathy for Robert Marshall's wife. He didn't really want to kill her, but in the end he had taken so much money that he basically felt he had to go.
Through with it.
But because he didn't want to do it himself, he brought another accomplice in, which is part of the reason he ended up getting caught. The third type of hit man they call the journeyman. They explained it in the news story as a hit man like John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson's characters in pulp fiction. This is the calm, cool and collected hit man. Then there's probably the rarest type the group of criminologists conducting the study called the Master.
According to NBC, these guys are hard to study because when they do carry out a hit, it looks like an accident or something random, so most of the time they're floating around out there not getting caught. They mostly have military backgrounds and her weapons experts.
As I said, a lot of people who have.
Looked at Nick Rudd's case agrees that this was some kind of targeted hit. As we know, Nick was separated from his wife in the months before his murder. He had been staying with his friend Brandon. According to Nick's sister, Stephanie, both Nick and Brandon were involved in drugs during this time.
So there are a few possibilities here. One that the killer was targeting Brandon or maybe just trying to steal drugs from him, and that Nick coming there was something the killer hadn't counted on, or this could have been some kind of a setup. Brandon had security cameras in his back bedroom. Stephanie has wondered why he didn't see the killer circling the house. By the way, the police also questioned Stephanie extensively. She was very forthcoming about this.
She believes they questioned her due to the fact that she dropped Nick off and because she was a drug user and dealer. Also, after police found Brandon the next day, remember he'd allegedly slept outside, he was taken into custody in question, but Brandon was never charged with anything connected to next death, and then the case seemed to stall. Michelle talked about her frustrations with the police during this time. She believed that they had written this off as just another drug murder.
Stark County is very small. There's three towns in a val Stark County in Indiana. There's North Judson where I live, Knox, which is where that happened at, and then there's Orban Davis.
It's all small, very very small.
Nothing even the three counties, the three areas combined still wouldn't make up a small city to you. Probably, so everybody knows everything, like especially you know how that is in small town talk and talk and gossip. We've heard so many different stories. I couldn't even and I wish looking back, and of course I wasn't even in my right mind, I wrote I would have wrote down everything, but I didn't didn't even know the importance of that, because I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of things. And
some of the things was repetitive, you know. And so two of the detectives that Stark County, it's out of Knox, the Stark County Sheriff's department, well, they had like probably three detectives on the case, right away.
It was just like Barney Fife. I'm not even kidding, Uh, it was it was a joke.
They had really probably never investigated a homicide before and they were thrown into it.
But recently police agreed to let Stephanie and Michelle rewatch the video of the night that Nick was murdered. Stephanie and Michelle said since they had been talking to this podcast, they felt that the police were being more responsive to them.
You've been involved with the podcast. They've been getting a lot more phone calls, which you know, obviously some of those are crap, you know, but yeah, yeah, but there's more people, you know, people are talking again. He did inform us that he had gotten a tip that day. Of course, he didn't say what it was or who it was, but he did say that they had had a call.
Stephanie told us that when she and her mother rewatched the video, they found themselves focusing on details that they had not noticed before. And again, these are details that have never been made public.
I did notice, and I told the detectives. I thought it was just kind of funny saying it. But in the one clip of the guy walking around back, he bends over at some point in time. I don't know if he dropped something, but he could tell when he bent over, like his clothing stretched around it, and you could see that he was a little sicker on the hips. And so then he walked around and I got to watch the video footage that they showed us. It was not the original footage that I got to see. It
was from up. It was up closer, and it was at a different direction. The camera the one camera that they showed us the footage on, and it was in color, and we got to see. I know it's hard to watch, but it was Nick running out and then it takes a while and then the guy runs out after him.
Stephanie said the way the person in the video walked reminded her of someone. We won't use their name here because it's not someone police, to our knowledge, have ever mentioned in their investigation at all, and we're not sure
if they've ever even interviewed this person. Stephanie also said she noticed something else when she rewatched the video, the fact that the killer walked around to the back of the house with the glass patio and made a point to come back to the front door to gain entry to the house.
A year prior to all this happening, probably a little over year, the couse rated Brandon's house to arrest him and literally tried to kick the door in, and eventually they had to knock on the door ass be let in so they could do this raid because they couldn't.
Get into the house.
Brendan had reinforced his door so instead of just you know when you put a new door knob on your door, instead of those little screws that come in the pack that's only like an inch or too long. Yeah, he put in like seven eight inch nails like screws through the side of the house. So it was reinforced really good. Yeah, the guy when he walks up, which I thought was kind of and it could have been just a coincidence that he did it, but when he walks up, he
kicked the door in. Before he even kicked the door, and he goes to turn the handle like it's like he's it's like, I need it to be unlocked. Yeah that I know, I locked the door when I walked out, so maybe maybe it was opposed to be unlocked, you know.
Chief Detective David Combs from the Stark County Sheriff's Office emailed us and said that h J and Brandon have all been interviewed several times. He said, quote, currently, I'm not comfortable saying that anyone has been ruled out. As of right now, there has not been any suspect DNA identified. I've revisited the crime scene and reviewed crime scene photographs
end quote. There are still a lot of questions in this case, like was Nick the target that night, and if so, who wanted him dead, who set him up? And whin who is the bald guy? Was that a crucial clue or just something random? He blurted out. The killer may have been wearing a mask or a balaklava. That could either mean that Nick somehow fought the guy and got the balaklava off or pulled the mask down, or that he mistook the smooth surface for a bald head.
Or it could have just been something random. He blurted out. At that point, he was dying and he could have been confused. He was wrong about being shot. Then again, he did know his own name. He seemed to be trying to get a message across I just wish we could figure out what that message is. Michelle said that one thing that puzzles her is that Nick knew everyone who has been named as a potential person of interest.
So if he recognized his killer, why why wouldn't he name them when he was asked who it was?
Nick knew of them. So I really think the bald thing has very little. It's irrelevant because I think that in his mind he thought that they were bald.
But here's another thing that I thought.
And here's another theory of mine, because the guy, like I said, the guy was thirty to forty five seconds later. You know, Nick had that much time to run from him, and we ran out of the house. So I don't know if Nick pulled the mask off of him when they were fighting, and it took him a few seconds to kind of re situate, put the masks on, put the hat on, and their run out.
That's just the theory of mine.
There didn't seem to be much other evidence.
Michelle said that some evidence had been sent for DNA testing in South Bend, Indiana, which does have more facilities, but she said detectives there have told her so far they have not found any matches other than the video footage, which is a public The best piece of evidence that we have.
Is that photo.
I really believe someone out there knows something something that could help lead to an arrest. One thing we've heard is that h J's friend worked at a fertilizer plant, and that apparently people who work at fertilizer plants do wear outfits similar to the one on camera. I've also heard it could be someone who works in farming or.
Works with seeds. In this community, there is a.
Lot of farming, so I know that we have to cast a wide net, but we have to start with the crime scene. In what we know, someone out there might recognize some detail, maybe the writing on the jacket or the type of coat, which to me looks a little like a rain slicker. The tiniest detail could crack this case, and Nick and his family and his children deserve that. We'll post that image on our instagram at helen gonpot. Crime Stoppers has announced a reward of twenty
five hundred dollars. You can be totally anonymous with them. If the tip leads to the solving of the case or an arrest, you're eligible to collect that money. You can also contact crime Stoppers at five four eight two eight eight stop, or you can call the Star County Sheriff's Office at five seven four, seven, seven two three seven seven to one. I'm Katherine Townsend. This is Helen Gone Murder Line. Helen Gone Murder Line is a production
of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It's written and narrated by me Katherine Townsend and produced by Gabby Watts. Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her research assistance. Noah camer mixed and scored this episode. Our theme song is by Ben Salek, Executive producers of Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and L. C.
Crowley.
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