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Taylor was right. All of my excitement was starting to turn to grief. I didn’t know what made me think that somehow this would blow everything wide open and I’d have everything set for me to spring my trap on Ted.
“Why is this so hard?” I grunted. I was so frustrated. I just wanted to hit something, and I wanted that something to be Ted.
“Wait a minute…” Taylor said. “What about the friend? The one who’s house he was at when the fire with his parents happened.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Maybe we can’t pin your murder on him, but there might be a way to pin the murder of his parents.”
“You’re right.”
Taylor grabbed his laptop and started looking up details of the fire using Ted’s real name of Greg Lydell. Surprisingly, there were several in depth articles from that area about it. After doing a bit more research we were able to come up with the name Karen Fox. After a bit more snooping on social media we found her, and then looked up her number.
“I’m not sure I want to talk about this…” Karen said when I told her I wanted to talk to her about the night of that fire. “I told the reporters back then everything that I could remember or wanted to say.”
“I’m not a reporter,” I explained. “Listen, if there is anything you remember about that night—anything that points a finger at the guilt of Greg Lydell—you’ve got to tell me. I think he’s done it again. We have strong evidence that he actually tried to kill someone else the same way.”
“Oh, no!” Karen gasped.
“Please. Won’t you help me?”
There was silence on the line. I could almost hear Karen getting her nerve up.
“Ok,” she finally said. “Greg was at my house. We were there having a party while my parents were out of town. I went downstairs to get some more soda from the basement. That’s when I saw Greg. He was grabbing a can of lighter fluid off the shelf. When I asked him what he was doing, he tried to play it off and said he wanted to borrow some for his family barbecue the next morning. I told him I knew he was lying and he just laughed at me. Then he left the party but returned a while later, without the can. I was going to question him, but then we learned of the fire. I knew he did it, but I didn’t want to believe him. I couldn’t bear to think that a friend of mine, a guy I kind of had a crush on—that he would do that to his own parents. I wouldn’t let myself believe it, but as I got older I knew he was guilty.”
“Karen, you have to go to the cops. He has to face justice.”
“It’s been too long,” Karen said.
“No. There is no statute of limitations on murder. We have to do something,” I said. I was pleading with her. Finally, I came clean. “Karen, he tried to kill me the same way. He is alone with my two little boys. They are in danger. The man needs to be behind bars. But I need your help to do it.”
There was silence on the other line for a moment. I wanted to say more, to plead the case a little better, but I was terrified of saying too much. It was obvious that Karen had been scared or intimidated into not saying anything. I could tell that she’d learned who Ted really was and what he was capable of.
But the guilt had to be brutal. She’d done a great job of stuffing it down so far back into the dark recesses of her mind that it never bothered her. It never surfaced. But I’d poked it and prodded it until it was now free out in the open once again. She knew that she had to help me; it was the right thing to do.
“Ok,” Karen said. “Just tell me what to do.”
We set Karen up on a Skype call and we videoed everything she said. After it was over I thanked her sincerely. “I know how hard this was for you. But you are helping to make sure that justice is served. With this we can finally go to the police and make a formal report. I don’t know if it will lead to anything, but it’s a start. Thank you, so much.”
“You’re welcome,” Karen said. She was crying by the end of it. It could be the fear and the emotional toll that this confession had taken on her. I now owed it to her to keep her safe and make sure that Ted never knew she talked to us.
After the phone call with Karen I called the police. It took me speaking with a few people before I finally found my way to a detective, Henry Fisk, who seemed very interested in what I had to say.
