The Murder Years: Ep. 8 - The Curse

This series is inspired by true events. The stories you're about to hear are fictional, and so are the characters who are played by actors. In the late summer of nineteen eighty seven, days after escape convict Stephen Hartford is captured and sent back to prison, my friends and I leave for our first year at college. We're so excited to go and have a fresh start, but putting in the past four years of tragedies behind us isn't easy. Tatiana remembers that time pretty clearly.

All of the murders that happened in Mount Pine from our freshman year through our senior year changed us radically.

I mean really, or at least they changed me.

I mean, I moved to New York City for art school, and my parents were not thrilled about it. They bought me mace for my key chain, they signed me up for self defense classes, and in their minds, New York work was way more terrifying than Mount Pine. I wasn't so sure about that.

Yeah, I remember that first semester at college. I had a night class and I actually wrote this in my journal. Here, I'll read it. I wrote, I'm scared walking through the quad on Wednesday nights, I'm constantly looking over my shoulder, preparing myself to be attacked.

Maybe I should drop the class.

I was studying fashion merchandising at school and enjoying my freedom, maybe a little too much. I actually went wild, if I'm being honest, I was drinking a lot and dating a lot, if that's what you even call that. And now, looking back, I think I was trying to drown my sadness and my pain from all those years.

Yeah, we all had our ways of coping. I tried to do the long distance thing with my high school boyfriend Ethan, but that ends up fizzling out. I throw myself into my classes, and the first few months we were away, I'd call home and my parents would say everything in Mount Pine seemed to have calmed down. Not a single murder, suicide, or freak accident for thirty years. It seemed as if the curse or whatever it was, had been lifted or simply vanished. Thirty years of peace

The Curse.

So back to college for a minute. My group of friends continues on with our college studies. I focus on school. I love my communication classes a lot.

You know.

I thought I.

Would go on to be an interviewer of some kind, maybe on a show like Entertainment Tonight or maybe even Sixty Minutes. But I eventually find my niche as a magazine contributor and end up traveling around the country in search of good stories. Tatiana studies art in New York and after a few years moves back to Mount Pine.

I learned so much, and living in New York was my real education. Eventually I graduated, but after a few years of waiting tables and doing the struggling artist thing, I moved out of the city. Yeah, I got married. I started teaching art at our local community college.

Lauren goes to school in Dallas. Then after graduation, relocates to Houston.

Marketing, and then I ended up getting a job at this high end hotel spot worked my way up to manager. I like making people feel good. I guess I never could have imagined ending up there, but I really love it.

Carla eventually graduates with a degree in sociology.

The highlight of my college years was meeting the guy who would become my husband. Shortly after graduation, we got married, then started having kids. Then we moved back to Mount Pine in twenty twenty four. Boys, yeah, oh, no joke.

They were a lot of work.

Once they were all in school and I had my days free, I went to work at a nonprofit, then decided to go back to school and become a paralegal.

Melanie also ends up back in Mount Pine.

I studied fashion merchandising, but you kind of have to live in New York to make a real go of that career, and so I moved back to Mount Pine to be closer to my family.

So we're all living our lives, and then in twenty twelve, Mount Pine calls me back. My mom is diagnosed with cancer and needs me to come home. We had already lost my dad back in twenty ten. That was awful, so of course I drop everything and come home to take care of her.

It was good to have you back in town.

You'd been back for visits over the years, but when you moved back. I remember how shocked you were at how big Mount Pine and the surrounding areas had become. We had new housing developments, new shopping centers, tons of new restaurants.

I mean we even got a sushi please.

Oh wow. The population exploded, like tripled. And while I missed the small town feel of the Mount Pine that we all grew up in, it was kind of exciting to see all the growth. I mean, new movie theaters, new boutiques, the Bowling Alley was remodeled.

So Melanie, Carla and I are busy, but we see each other when we can, and before you know it, ten years has passed. It's twenty twenty two and my mom finally succumbs to cancer. All of the girls come back for her funeral, and it means so much to me.

It was just so sad. I loved your mom.

No one can prepare you for how much it hurts to lose a parent. We were all happy to have each other no matter what.

So I plan on leaving right after the funeral, but strangely, something tells me not to go just yet. It's the first time the five of us have been together since we left Mount Pine for College. And the next day.

The woman's body has been found in the woods behind Mount Pine Community College.

And a week after that.

A gruesome discovery in a north Side home.

And ten days after that, I'm at the scene of yet another murder.

It's deja vu all over again. The five of us are devastated by the news. More murder, multiple murders. This hasn't happened in thirty years. We had a murder reprieve for thirty years. I mean, is it us? Is it the fact that the five of us are together? Is that what sets the curse in motion? We all meet at Millie's Diner to talk.

We were sitting in Millie's, a cute little outdoor cafe on Main Street, and the talk was all about the news.

All of a sudden, a lot of sirens went by. What was with all the sirens? What was happening?

I take up my phone and google Mount Pine a headline two young children murdered by their deranged mother.

I called my dad. He was a paramedic, he would know what was going on.

The sirens drown out Carla's voice on the phone. When we all sit there in silence, watching the fear grow on her face as she listens to her father. Eventually, Carla hangs up the phone.

What my dad told me was horrible, so so horrible.

His unit was called that morning. The scene was gruesome.

He said that a single mother killed her two young children.

A single mother killed her two young children, and she confessed it seems late the night before, while the children were still asleep, the mother carried them to the garage, put them in their car seats in the car, buckled them in. Then she turned on the ignition, locked the doors, and went into the house. Two hours later, she called nine to one one. The children were three and four years old. When I got there, the two boys were already dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Carla's dad says the woman admitted to suffering from depression after having her second child, and she just couldn't take it anymore. And she did it because she believed her kids would be better off dead than being raised by her. I mean, I just don't have any words.

I couldn't believe it. Two dead kids and their mom is the one who killed them.

I mean, today we know so much more about postpartum depression, but back then not so much. I just remember wanting to get the hell out of Mount Vine.

It's been almost two months since my mom's funeral. My plan was to leave Mount Pine and go back to work, but now everything's changed in six weeks. There's a new wave of evil and I want answers.

I need to know.

Can anything from the past help make sense or stop what's happening today?

I am determined to find out. I'm staying.

I couldn't believe what was happening to us again. It took me back to high school. I felt it viscerally and I.

Didn't like it. It was unsettling.

And now that I had kids, my mama barons thinks for coming out. I had to protect them at all costs.

One case that absolutely blows my mind is one just four blocks away from me. A forty something year old guy strangles to death his long term girlfriend, shoots her two dogs, then drives them one hundred miles away and buries them all in a shallow.

That story was so insane. I mean, that guy was a monster. I think a hunter stumbled onto their shallow grave a few weeks later, so I mean, they found the bodies, but they couldn't find the killer.

My friends and I are glued to our TVs, wondering where the guy is and if cops are going to catch him anytime soon.

I was so relieved when they caught him. It was actually crazy. One night, a driver saw him standing on the edge of a bridge about to jump off. He was about to commit suicide, but instead he was persuaded to come down and cops arrested him without any problems.

Then two months later there are all these random attacks on joggers around town. Three women are beaten and sexually assaulted. The masked man attacks women early in the morning and late in the evening.

I had to stop running.

It was just to scary to be out there, and it was upsetting because police couldn't catch this guy, even with the descriptions the women were giving. I couldn't take it anymore. Who is this guy living amongst us? Is it the guy checking me out at the grocery store, or the guy fixing my car, or is it my next door neighbor. Nobody knew who it was or how he kept getting away with it.

We weren't safe anywhere.

Then he actually killed someone. He killed a young woman. She was a kindergarten teacher. She had only moved him out Pine about five months before he raped her, and they finally got his DNA and it matched. He was a married ex cop from Northgate, an ex cop.

And as if all this isn't enough, stuff keeps happening. A woman poisons her husband, a sixteen year old girl dies in a motorcycle accident, a firefighter accidentally runs over and kills his young son, and the mayor's brother commits suicide.

I was ready to close my business and move far, far away.

Yeah, I'm almost ready to leave with Melanie. But again, why why do we have so many tragedies in Mount Pine? Why us can we chuck all of this up to the influx of people like maybe they're they're the ones who have brought these problems to our town. No, because we had the same problems back when Mount Pine had a population of just twelve thousand people. I ask some of the detectives who talked with me about the cases from the eighties, what's their take on this new wave of crimes.

Yeah, it was unbelievable. It was happening again, and they were all so violent. You know. I was starting to come around to agreeing with people that maybe Mount Pine was cursed. I didn't believe mount Pine was cursed, I mean cursed. How do you even prove.

That bad things can and do happen all the time in places like Mount Pine. I mean, it's often related to poverty and drugs, but Mount Pine didn't really have too big of a problem with either, So I don't know.

After this new string of crimes, I'm more convinced than ever that we're cursed. We grew up hearing the story that Mount Pine was supposedly built on sacred Native American land, especially at where mister Billingsley lived in that new subdivision. Remember he was our history teacher who was murdered by his girlfriend's ex. If the stories are true, then he lived right in the middle of that stolen sacred land.

But are they true?

Maybe it all links back to that, to some horrible thing the towns founders did on the land, some horrible thing we're still paying for today. Since I'm the person who needs to know everything, I talked Tatiana into going with me to the Mount Pine Library to help me learn more about this.

The libraryan told us where the Native American history and culture books would be, and we just dug in.

We PLoP ourselves down and start reading, and we learn a lot like legend has it when a building is built on an ancient Indian burial ground, the building and its inhabitants get terrorized by vengeful spirits. Oh, and there's this one tale I read about from Vermont. Some of the details and dates vary. Some say it's from the

Here's another story we found. It happened in Charles Island in Connecticut. Legend has that the land there is sacred and anyone who tried to build on it would be cursed.

We can't find anything official that says Mount Pine was built on sacred Native American land or that it's cursed. I wonder if the Mount Pine Historical Society has any information that could be useful. I probably should have gone there first. I wonder, am I about to learn that all the bad stuff in Mount Pine was in his payback for?

What?

For what the white man has done to the Native Americans in the area. That would make perfect sense to me.

I wanted to help in any way I could. There were so many tragedies in town. I wanted to know why they happened too.

Doris Winslow and I went to school together. Well, she was two years older than I was today. She basically is the Mount Pine Historical Society, which is run out of the old Victorian house in the center of town. Thankfully, she agrees to talk with me.

So, knowing you were coming, I pulled what information I could find, and there wasn't a lot, but this was

I do too. Detective Peters is right, there's no way to prove a curse.

I wish there was. God.

Maybe we're the curse, us girls whenever we're together, or maybe I'm the curse. It's like all the murders happen when I was in high school, they stop when I left for college. Then I return to town and so do they, or maybe it's just a bunch of messed up people doing truly messed up things. The sad fact is that we may never know why these murders happened, back then, why they're happening, and today all we want is for to stop.

But I don't care that you aren't able to solve this mystery, this mystery that is Mount Pine.

I'm so glad you did this.

Even though it brought back a lot of painful memories, it helped me to process and deal with it all. I pushed a lot of my feelings down and this helped give me closure.

Yeah, it helped me too.

I think it helped all of us, and I hope we were able to honor the memories of the victims.

Yeah, our friends, classmates, our teacher, and our fellow Mount pineers. So here's de Lisa Anderson, Don Cartwright, Daniel Walters, Charlotte Murphy, Victoria Brown.

Mister Billingsley, Buster Charles, the brave women who were able to outsmart that escaped convict, and the most recent victims of Mount Pine.

All we can do really is hope to put the murder years past and present behind us. Mount Pine deserves some peace. We all deserve some peace, but I'm not sure we'll ever have it.

I heard what you're doing, talking to people, digging up all these old crimes. All I gotta say is you better be careful because you might be next.

The Murder Years is a production of a y R Media and iHeartMedia. Executive producer Elisa Rosen for AYR Media co executive producer Paulina Williams. Written by Leah Rothman, directed by Michael Selditch. Original concept developed in partnership with Anne, Margaret Johns and Greg Spring. Casting by Eisenberg Beans Casting Senior Associate producer Eric Newman, Associate producer Jill Pushesnik. Editing and sound design by Tristan Bankston. Mastering by Cameron Taggie,