A Lie to Die For (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

that they were not.

“Not only do they get caught, but they also face just extreme repercussions.”

But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format, then you come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload two, three, even four times every week. So if that's of interest to you, the next time the fall of button is really excited to see a newly released movie, go to the movie with them, but the instant it starts, spoil it

for them.

Okay, let's get into our first story called "Safe House."

Around 1am on December 3, 1999, a 67-year-old billionaire banker named Edmund Saffra sat up in bed inside of his penthouse apartment in the country of Monaco. Edmund's wife, Lily Saffra, didn't sleep in the same bedroom as him. In part because Edmund, he had a lot of medical issues, and he needed to get medication throughout the night, and so, Lily was sleeping down the hallway in a separate bedroom.

And in fact, right now, the reason Edmund was awake was to get his medication. His overnight nurse had come into the bedroom to give it to him. So Edmund had Parkinson's disease, which is a serious nervous system disorder that causes movement problems amongst other things, and as a result he required around the clock care.

But money was no object to Edmund, I mean he's a billionaire, so he had hired four doctors

and eight nurses to work exclusively for him. And actually, about a month earlier, he'd convinced all of these medical providers to move with him and his wife from New York City to this enormous luxurious apartment in Monaco. There were tons of police, the crime rate was very low, and the building he was in in particular

“was known to have extremely high security, which was very important to Edmund, because”

now he's one of the richest people in the world, and so he knew he was a prime target for robbers. Plus, he was more vulnerable now than ever, since his disease made it pretty difficult to move around without help, and he just knew he would not be able to defend himself if somebody broke in.

And so by moving to Monaco, Edmund really felt like he had heightened his security tenfold,

but remember, money's not an issue for Edmund, and so once he was in Monaco, he actually continued taking further measures to really ensure his house was as safe as possible. He'd replaced all the doors in this apartment with heavy reinforced steel, and the windows had been fitted with this very expensive thick bulletproof glass, and also steel shutters that were literally impossible to open from the outside.

He'd also hired a 25-person security detail made up of highly trained intelligence officers. I mean, even one of his night nurses, Ted Mar, who was actually the guy coming in right now to give him medication, was a former green beret, army special forces. And so with all these people and all these measures in place, Edmund really felt secure. He felt like, you know what, I'm safe.

And so now Edmund took his nightly pills, and then after he swallowed them, Edmund closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep, content to knowing that just like every night, at least now in Monaco, he was as safe as he could be. However, just a few hours later, Edmund woke up again, but now to the sound of an alarm blaring across his apartment.

And he smelled smoke. He opened his eyes, and he saw one of his other nurses, a woman named Vivian Terente, running over to his bed, and Ted, the green beret, was standing in the doorway behind her, and he was clutching his stomach, which was soaked in blood. And so Edmund's frantic, he's asking what's going on, but Vivian, she's very calm,

and she helps Edmund sit up, and she told him, calmly, but urgently, that right now they have to go into his bathroom, and wait, because there's an intruder in the house. And when he heard this, it's like Edmund's mind went blank with panic. I mean, this was literally his worst fear, it's the thing he'd spent so much money, then

“put so much energy into mitigating against how could this be happening?”

But he really didn't have any time to freak out or ask any questions, before Vivian had hoisted him up onto her shoulder, and carried him into his nearby enormous bathroom, where she gently put him down, and then she shut the door and locked it with her and there with him. And then as soon as they got settled, Edmund turned to Vivian, and he's like, "What is

going on? What happened? What do you mean there's an intruder?" And Vivian said she didn't really know, but from what she had heard from the staff and from Ted, is that someone somehow broke into this apartment, and they set a fire, and

premises.

“Like, the staff was in overdrive trying to find them and getting in touch with police.”

And so, for right now, we just need to stay put, we're safe in the bathroom, and we just need to wait. And so Edmund, I mean, at this point, he was much calmer, or being behind a locked door, and he's with Vivian, and he knows he's got dozens of staff that are on the case here. You know, so he's worried, but he's thinking, "Okay, like, this is going to be handled."

Like, "I'm safe, my staff is on it, everything's going to be fine." The next morning, a man named Daniel Serdat, who was the general prosecutor of Monaco, stepped through the burnt ruins of Edmund's bedroom, while a forensics team scoured the apartment for evidence. Edmund and his nurse Vivian were both dead inside the bathroom.

They had died of smoke and allation, waiting to be saved. The other overnight nurse, Ted Mar, the green bra, he had been stabbed several times in

“the stomach and leg, and was in very serious condition, but he was in the hospital recovering.”

The only person who had somehow miraculously escaped without any injury, who had been on the same floor as Edmund and Vivian and Ted, was Edmund's wife, Lily. She claimed during the entire incident, she had been hiding in the house's safe room. So at this point, the case was actually feeling pretty open and shut to general prosecutor Serdat.

Lily, who was now set to inherit $3 billion now that Edmund had died, was the obvious suspect,

but what Serdat couldn't figure out was how Lily might have committed the crime. I mean, she really couldn't have been the actual killer. I mean, the overnight nurse, Ted Mar, is like this big former green bra who's actively looking for security threats, and there was just no way that Lily, who was just very physically small and frail and she's 64 years old, could have overpowered and stabbed him repeatedly,

it just seemed sort of improbable. But, you know, maybe she hired someone to come in here and kill her husband. However, if she hired someone, they had managed to get in and out without ever showing up on any of the security cameras trained on the doors of the apartment, and Serdat, by this point, had checked every room in this apartment, and all the windows had been closed,

and the outside still shutters were locked, and so we felt like there's something missing here. But he didn't know what it was. Serdat would spend the next few days interviewing all of Edmund's household staff and family and business associates, but the information he got only made Serdat more confused.

Everyone who worked for Edmund really seemed to love him. He was a definitely strange person who was clearly very paranoid about his safety, but he paid a staff exceptionally well and treated them really well too. So there didn't seem to be any clear kind of revenge motive for many of them, and also critically, no one who worked for him benefited financially from his death.

In fact, if he died, it was quite bad for virtually all of them. They loved their jobs, they paid well, they'd be out of a job. Simon's family all pointed the finger at his wife, Lily, saying that in addition to the circumstantial evidence that she's like the one who was untouched by this intruder, she also, in recent times, had become more and more controlling, as his illness had

progressed. And I mean, she also obviously had this big financial motive to have him kill.

She's going to inherit $3 billion.

However, Serdat, at least to this point, had not found any evidence that connected Lily

“to committing a crime here, like there were no money transfers or secret of phone calls”

or meetings that would suggest Lily had hired someone to murder her husband. And so far, the forensic evidence from the crime scene itself was no help. This was 1999, so things like DNA took a whole lot longer to test. But beyond that, I mean, the crime scene technicians, they hadn't even found any fingerprints yet.

That he's thinking what he really needs right now is an eyewitness other than Lily. He needs to talk to Ted, and three days after the tragedy, Serdat got his wish. Ted was in rough shape from the stabbing, but he was now healthy enough to be interviewed. So on December 6th, Serdat stepped into Ted's hospital room, took a seat by his bedside, and asked him, "What happened?"

But Ted, he just closed his eyes, he took a deep breath, and he said, "He was really sorry."

It would turn out that Serdat wasn't actually missing a critical fact.

He just wasn't understanding what the facts he had meant. He knew that Edmund was extremely paranoid and desperate to fortify his apartment against anyone who might hurt him, and he also knew that Edmund's employees all loved him.

in Edmund's death along with the death of Vivian Terente and the wounding of Ted Mar.

“So everyone who worked for Edmund knew how obsessed he was with safety, including Ted.”

And Ted loved Edmund, he really did, and he wanted to work for him forever, and he thought that if he could just prove that he, Ted, could protect Edmund from his greatest fears, that Edmund would not only keep him around, but he might promote him and trust him even more deeply. So, Ted decided to stage a break-in.

He stabbed himself, and then he set a fire in a trash can, and then he ran and showed Vivian the other nurse his wounds and pointed out the fire and said he'd been attacked and he was going to go get help, and his plan was he would make himself look like the hero who'd fended off intruders to save Edmund, but what Ted had not accounted for was that the steel doors that Edmund had put in the apartment were so secure, that literally nobody

could get through them, even the firefighters. And so the fire that Ted said it caught worse and worse, and by the time the firefighters

“actually got inside, Edmund and Vivian had suffocated.”

And so Ted, he lied about what happened that night, and ultimately he got people killed,

and he also lied about his background. He wasn't even a green beret, he just pretended to be. And so in the end he was found guilty of Arson and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Our next story is called The Wedding Photos. On the afternoon of November 8th, 2002, a 22-year-old woman named Chan Changyeon, smiled

in front of a camera at a photo studio in Hong Kong. She was wearing this beautiful wedding dress in a white veil, and she was holding this glorious bouquet of flowers. In Hong Kong, a lot of couples would get these formal wedding portraits taken both together and solo in the weeks or months before the actual ceremony.

And so that's what was going on here. And today, Chan had also brought along her best friend, Finn, to help make sure they got the very best shots. And so now, as Chen was posing, she looked past the camera, and she saw Finn standing by the back wall with this huge encouraging smile interface telling her like, "Keep it up,

you look amazing." And so the photographer pressed the shutter button and the camera flashed, and at that

moment, Chan just felt this amazing rush of excitement, like she knew that she was doing

the right thing, and couldn't wait to start this new chapter in her life. However, a month and a half later, on the morning of December 25th, one of Chan's neighbors was walking up to his apartment building. When he noticed, there was a young woman lying on the sidewalk just up head. And he got close enough, he saw there was this huge pool of blood all around her.

And then, when he got even closer, he saw that there was no saving this girl, that her head was like caved in, she was dead. And so the neighbor who's in complete shock kind of staggered to his feet, and he was about to go call police when suddenly he heard a scream coming from above him, and he only had

a second to jump out of the way, as a man came herdling down, who was the one screaming,

and smashed into the ground, and died right next to the squirrel. Twenty minutes later, Detective Pong with the Hong Kong police force looked down at the two dead bodies in the sidewalk. Just behind him, the neighbor who had witnessed this whole thing was trying to frantically explain what he'd seen, that he had found this woman, and then the man had just sort of fallen

immediately after and smashed into the ground that all just happened so fast, he didn't even know what to do, Detective Pong could tell the man was frantic, and he told the guy to just calm down, take a deep breath, and then once he had, once he'd calm down,

“Pong asked him, "Do you have any idea which window, which apartment building up here?”

The man could have fallen from, like when you looked up, did you see him come out of a particular apartment?" The very shaken up man, he nodded, and then looked up at the building, and he pointed. And when Pong looked at what he was pointing at, he saw there was a window that was actually partially open up on the eighth floor, and even from down on the sidewalk, Pong could

see there was blood smeared on the window pan. Detective Pong summoned the building's landlord to let him into the building, and then once he was inside, he led a team of investigators up to the eighth floor, and they stopped in the hallway outside of the door of the apartment that had the bloody window. By this point, the victims on the sidewalk had actually been identified.

The girl was changing young who lived in the apartment on the eighth floor, and the

Now obviously, Detective Pong knew that both these victims had fallen to their death, that

they died from smashing into the ground. But what the Detective wasn't sure of was, had they both jumped, or had maybe one of them

“been pushed, or maybe both got pushed, like was there a third person who pushed them both?”

He didn't know, but Pong hoped, when he went in the apartment, he might be able to get some clue into what led to the victims falling from the apartment, and so the landlord he opened up the eighth floor apartment door, and Detective Pong and his team, they stepped inside, and immediately they are met with a scene of just absolute chaos. The furniture in the living room was all overturned and pushed all over the place, like

there had been some big struggle here, and then Pong walked through the room down the hallway into the bedroom and forced that door open, and in there there was bloody handprints all over the walls, and over near that open window they saw from the street, which they presumed is where the victims fell out, or were pushed out, and then the bed was totally soaked with blood.

And so clearly, there has been some sort of violent attack that took place in here before

“the body is wound up on the street outside, but it wasn't clear if it was the couple attacking”

each other, or if there was like some third person involved to by now has fled the scene,

and as Detective Pong continued surveying the bedroom just looking around, something lying on the floor near the bed caught his attention. There was a bloody hammer, and so Pong, he's having like a visceral reaction to imagining that being involved in this attack, and he goes over and he kneels down to pick it up, and as he did, he noticed something else that was lying on the ground right next to

it, and when he saw it, he just immediately made him feel sad. It was a photo album lying open to a portrait of this young bride, it was Chan, and she was wearing her wedding dress. Pong pulled on a pair of gloves, and he picked up the album, and he began flipping through it.

“And as he did, he just started to feel like something was weird about this album, like”

the pictures just seemed off, and as he kept flipping, he realized what it was that he was picking up on. So the album was full of all these beautiful wedding photos of this the smiling young bride, but there were no pictures of the groom. The following day, Detective Pong stepped into an interrogation room, bringing with him that

photo album from the crime scene. The room was Chan's best friend, Fen, who it would turn out was present at the time a lot of these photos were taken, and Fen was sitting at the table, and she was shaking, and she was looking down at the floor, she was clearly very upset. So this case had taken another very weird turn, so it was odd for a bride to take wedding

photos alone, without her partner in any of the photos like this album seemed to represent. That when Detective Pong had talked to the families of both the victims, he'd learn something even more surprising. Chan and Pan, the victims, the boyfriend and girlfriend out on the sidewalk, they weren't engaged, and they had no plans to get married, and so this wedding album, which had initially

seemed so sad to Detective Pong, now just seemed really bizarre. He wondered if maybe Chan had been living a double life, and was secretly engaged to somebody else, and he figured if anybody might know the truth about this, it would be Chan's best friend, Fen. And so now, Detective Pong sat down across from Fen, and he opened up the photo album,

and he asked Fen if she knew anything about these photos. Fen immediately burst into tears and nodded and said yes, and so Detective Pong he encouraged Fen to tell me the story, like what do you mean, what do you know, and Fen, she was so upset and she could barely speak, but eventually she composed herself, and she just said, "There is no groom, he doesn't exist."

It would turn out Chan's relationship with her boyfriend, Pan, was very real, but it was on the rocks.

And so Chan had invented a fake second boyfriend to pressure her real boyfriend, Pan, into

committing to her, and so she had gone out and gotten these professional photos taken of herself in a wedding gown, and then she showed the photos to Pan. She showed him that album that was found at the crime scene, and she told him that another man had proposed to her, and she had said yes. Now Chan's hope, at least according to Fen, was that Pan, when he heard this, would

beg Chan to call off the wedding, and to marry him, but instead, Pan had flown into this insane jealous rage, and attacked Chan with a hammer before pushing her out the window

And then seconds later, when Pan realized what he'd just done, he'd been so overcome

with guilt that he jumped out too.

“Our next and final story of today's episode is called "Not Serrat."”

At one AM, on July 30, 2019, a 27-year-old man named Robert Kamu, sipped a glass of whiskey in a dimly lit dive bar in Los Angeles, California. By this point, he was on his 5th or 6th rank, and the room was starting to spin. The bar he was out was hosting some kind of open-might night, but Robert was barely paying attention to the performances, because he was completely devastated.

So Robert had literally just gone through this horrible breakup with his girlfriend. So his relationship with his girlfriend had been kind of rocky for a while, but then that morning they'd gotten into this enormous fight, and now Robert was sure that it was over. And so now, sitting depressed at the bar drinking by himself, Robert began to think that it's like, "Wow, my girlfriend was like the only good thing in my life, and now that

we're not together, I have nothing."

“I mean, he was still living with his parents, which was something he was not pleased”

about, but it is what it is, and he also had sort of neglected all of his other relationships with his friends, to focus on this relationship with his girlfriend, which obviously now was over. And so he didn't have friends to turn to, or really anybody in his life to turn to right now, as he was grieving the loss of this relationship.

All he felt he could do was just sit in this bar and drink alone and feel bad about himself. And so now he just took another swig of his whiskey and just decided to finally look up at the bar a small stage where the open night was happening. There was a group of people up there who were rapping, like into the mic, they were rapping. And as Robert watched and listened to them, he was struck by how free and unburdened they

all seemed.

“They were just passing the mic around, apparently saying whatever came to their minds,”

and they hyped each other up the whole time. There was no judgment or anything, it was just people having fun.

Now, Robert considered himself to be a pretty uncool guy from the suburbs, and he had never

even thought about rapping himself, like that was not even on his radar. But in this moment, it seemed like you know what, I should go give that a try. And also he was pretty drunk, so he did not feel particularly self-conscious about trying. So he grabbed his drink and he stumbled up to the stage. Now when Robert got to the front and the rapper saw him approaching, they were a little

surprised that he was coming up here to try his hand at this. But they waved him in and he joined their circle and Robert quickly began dancing while one of the other men finished his freestyle, and then when he was done, he just passed the mic to Robert. And so Robert, he grabbed the mic and he walks up onto the stage, and you know, the other

rappers are like, "Come on, you got this Robert, let's go man." And Robert, like, he was confident, you know, he's got the buzz going, he's confident, but he looked out to the sea of people in the bar, and some of them were on their phones and a lot of them weren't really paying attention, but some were watching him, and they were kind of like waiting, like, "I'll see what you got."

And suddenly, Robert's feeling pretty nervous, like, "He shouldn't be up here, I was he doing." But, for whatever reason, he just took a deep breath, and he started rapping,

like he'd never rap before, and suddenly he's, he's freestyling his feelings.

Now, he was definitely very clunky at first, and really for most of the performance, he was very clunky, this is not something he was good at naturally. But he did kind of get into a rhythm, and the crowd seemed decently into it, and the rappers are, like, you know, cheering him on, and he sort of bobbed his head to the beat, and he just spilled all these feelings he had, all these things that were bothering him, that

he would have shared with friends or family or something, but again, he feels like he has no one. He just has this anonymous crowd. And everyone's just like nodding along, and there's there's looks of like solidarity amongst people in the crowd, like, they get it, they've been to break-ups themselves, they understand him, and Robert, like, as it went on, he got more and more confident, and he was just really going deep, like, just getting everything off

his chest, and then when he was done, he just handed off the mic, and he walked off stage, actually feeling like a huge weight, and been lifted. Very soon, after Robert got off stage, the barren ounce last call. So Robert, he closed his tab, and he left, and it was very late by this point, and he knew he was way too tired and way too drunk to be driving, so he just staggered down the block to where he'd parked his car,

The next morning, when Robert woke up, he heard the sound of police sirens,

“somewhere in the distance. He opened his eyes, and he's got a horrible headache, he's totally hung”

over, but he sort of looked around and remembered what happened, like he's in his car, oh, that's right. I was at the bar, I came down here, I passed out, like he remembered the night. And so as he's jogging his memory, the sound of the sirens are getting louder and louder, and then they just abruptly stopped, and somewhere in the back of Robert's mind,

he figured that whatever problems the police or whoever was dealing with had been resolved.

But then, Robert heard this static voice on a megaphone that sounded like it was really close to him. So, again, he's got this horrible headache, he's not feeling good, he turns and squints and looks

“out the window, and as his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw that a fleet of police officers”

had completely surround that his car, and they were yelling at him through the megaphone to come out with his hands up. So, it would turn out that Robert's relationship with his girlfriend

had been on the rocks, because Robert was incredibly abusive, and his girlfriend, because of the abuse,

was pressing charges against him for domestic violence, and so Robert had actually been placed under house arrest with an ankle monitor until the trial, and this had made Robert so furious that yesterday morning before he wound up at the bar of that night to do his big rap, while allegedly that morning, he cut off his ankle monitor, kidnapped his girlfriend, and murdered her, and then that night he goes to the bar, and he proceeds to rap about what he

done, which was again, murder, allegedly, in front of a bar full of people, and someone at the bar, who was filming this open midnight on their phone, they were so alarmed by what Robert said during his freestyle, that after he was done, they sent the video to the police, and so with that video in hand, the police went out, and they arrested Robert Camo, and they charged him with capital murder. As of this recording, he still has not gone to trial.

A quick note about our stories, they are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved, and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes. The Mr. Ballum Podcast, strange dark and mysterious stories, is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr. Ballum. Our head of writing is Evan Allen, produced by Jeremy Boen and Cole Caccio, this episode was written by Kate Gallagher, story editing by Kate Murdock,

research and fact-checking by Shelley Xu, Samantha Banhous, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway, Camille Callahan, Alex Paul, Ben Fassiano, research and fact-checking supervision by Stevenier, audio editing, and post-produced by Whitley Caccio and Jordan Stitham, production support by Antonio Manada, and Delana Corley, artwork by Jessica Klogst and Kiner, theme song, Something Wicked by Ross plugged in.

Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballum Podcast, and just a reminder, every new and exclusive episode we've put out on the Mr. Ballum Podcast, you can also now watch on the Mr. Ballum YouTube channel that very same day, and trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe.

“Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballum. If you want to listen to episodes,”

one week early, and add free, you can subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts, or visit SiriusXM.com/podcast+ to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice.