U R NEXT | 1. An “Internet Terrorist”

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Have you ever had one of those nightmares where someone is after you but you can't get away your stuck

Running through water that's up to your neck and rising Grace has I woke up to a phone call. I want to say it was four o'clock in the morning Only when Grace wakes up the bad dream doesn't stop

“It was a woman's voice and she asked me are you okay?”

Grace isn't her real name we've changed it for her protection from the waking nightmare who's targeting her and her daughter Esther His aim is to terrify them and he'll stop at nothing It's late 2014 in a quiet American street lined with brick houses either side softball pitch round one corner An elementary school around another most of the residents are fast asleep apart from grace Who the hell is calling her at four in the morning to ask if she's okay?

She said my name is so until from the police department and the police are on their way Is your boyfriend in the house with you and I said yes he's right next to me and she goes are all the kids okay? Down the hall Grace's daughter Esther and her siblings are fast asleep Their safe aren't they?

“It was starting to escalate and make me nervous and then she asked me are there any guns in the house”

And I said yes should we go get them the officer on the other end of the line tries to calm Grace down No, no, but I need you to stay on the phone with me and we need you and your boyfriend to come outside with your hands up Obviously my heart's racing at this point. It really scared me A terrified grace shakes her partner awake As they walk together through their deathly silent house Grace catches movement in the corner of her eye

We have a big front window in our house and I'm just looking out the window And I see a shadow of a person running across a house like across the street from us. There's somebody outside Grace's breath catches in her chest She's almost at her front door, but she feels paralyzed She tries to get control of herself, but she can't think straight

Her legs are like jelly, her heart is beating almost through her chest She slowly opens the front door with shaking hands And then raises them high above her head We get big bright lights in our face and we have guns pointed at us

This is a story about a prolific online predator who targeted Grace's family and countless others

“An internet terrorist, that's the best thing to describe him as”

Whose crimes would span across the United States Senwa King Sheriff's Office, Jackson County Sheriff's Office, Missouri, Racing Police Department, Wisconsin And beyond Waterloo Regional Police and Canada The story about someone who's online actions crossed over into real world danger He was doing malicious things intentionally to harm people

I could be next But most of all, this is a story about the brave people who came together to fight back If I find out how he's doing it, I can stop it Nobody's going to get away with anything

Once we got started, we never stopped

You want to motivate me to tell me I can't get you Tell me I can't find you Tell me that From Sony Music Entertainment and novel, this is you, our next I'm Lea Alexander

This is Episode 1, an internet terrorist Long before Grace had to worry about her local police department storming into her home Or about online predators, she was just a regular mom Worrying about her kids, especially her daughter Esther She was suffering with anxiety

“And I think a lot of that was internal and she didn't really share outwardly that that was going on”

Esther is not her real name

And she's asked her words to be spoken by an actor I think a lot of may feel of myself when I was younger was very warped Like insecurity Just a very, very sad, clinical child Very worried about what the world thought of her and whether she was good enough

I felt like an alien I was like nobody else feels thanks the way that I feel them In 2014, a 16 year old Esther is having a really tough year Her parents have just divorced Which she's actually relieved about

At least now she doesn't have to handle the tension at home, whenever her dad is there But it's still a lot of change to deal with for someone so young She's also struggling with school At one point she was out of classes for months When I came back, I was super behind

I was kind of getting what I didn't know at the time Where the beginning was panic attacks But we're definitely panic attacks The only time that I felt okay was when I was asleep And when I wake up, I didn't want to be here

I couldn't see myself going to college, I couldn't see myself doing anything I just felt so hopeless Because I was like, I want to have a dream but I just don't see it Grace is slowly watching her daughter disappear into her own personal darkness

“I think she felt depressed and withdrawn”

So there was a lot of anxiousness and trepidation around that But there's the faintest glimmer making its ways through that darkness Like a single star in a black velvet sky It's distant light ears away But it's there and it's shining

That's when she found gaming kind of as that social outlet That's social outlet Esther being such an introvert Especially one who's struggling with anxiety Spends a lot of time at home

Hour after hour she watches on as her big brother plays video games It was like watching a movie that my brother kind of had influence on And I just thought that was so cool At some point he got busy or you got bored He just stopped playing as much

And I wanted to watch him and he wouldn't do it So I just started playing the games that I wanted to watch and play And then I got into gaming a lot And then once I started playing I had just got absolutely immersed in it Esther starts spending hours playing games online

She talks to other gamers over a headset while she plays

There wasn't a lot of girls doing it at the time

Before I had a webcam I would just pretend to be a boy like a little squeaker Because they would be nicer to me if they thought I was a little boy If they thought I was a girl Because if I was a girl it's just you here

Make me a sandwich Get back in the kitchen All the same stuff over and over Like it gets boring Esther doesn't let these extremely unoriginal and boring jokes push her away

She keeps gaming Hour after hour building up her skills Before long she's dropped the squeaker alias and she's playing as herself And she's winning For whatever reason she excelled in this male dominated arena

She can pretty much show up anybody

“I think gaming was a place where she felt powerful”

I kept up with the boys and I seemed a little bit embarrassed about it Like this little girl just kicked her butt

It felt like I was kind of turning something that I had always been into

A good thing of feeling like the outcasts Feeling like I don't belong and making myself belong I'm being like the boys don't want me here But I'm gonna be here anyways That felt really good

That was a pivotal moment for me and I was like Okay, okay, maybe I could do something with this That is when I started making videos Esther was on to something Because now millions of people all around the world

are spending hours watching their favorite gamers on live stream The biggest platform is Twitch In 2014 it has more than 50 million users Half of them spending up to three hours a day on there Collectively watching 12 billion minutes of content every month

“It's transformed gaming into something that was just a hobby into a career opportunity”

If you were good enough at your favorite game And engaging in a fun camera to captivate an audience while you play it Then you can make some serious cash But for the moment Esther is just starting out I made my own little logo for myself and created my own alias online

And I was on Twitter getting into the gaming community It was very active One day Esther is scrolling through Twitter In amongst all the memes gaming gossip And that one photo Ellen DeGeneres took at the Oscars

That everyone lost their damn minds over She gets a message Someone that I was mutuals with in the community Hey, I know that you're really good with words And my friend is really struggling with depression right now

Do you think you can talk to him? And I was like, yeah, absolutely, of course So he sends me his Twitter and I started DMing him

“I think he had like a black and white photo or something”

It wasn't of him it was like a character of some kind So I had no idea what he looked like It was very very common, especially in the gaming community To just have your logo as your profile picture Or like a character from an anime or whatever

Like a lot of people didn't have their faces I didn't see it as a red flag The two of them exchanged some messages back and forth I could just tell that he was really, really struggling Just generally depression, I think, and trusting people

Low self-confidence He told me that he was having a hard time communicating through text Like it was too much to say through text So we would just talk on Skype That again was very normal when you would game with people

You would get on Skype and like game together and talk He still doesn't show his face a lot while they're talking on Skype On the rare occasions that he does he cuts a pale kind of heavy set figure With brown hair past his shoulders But he usually has his camera off

So most of the time Esther can only hear his voice She doesn't know that much about him She knows he's around the same age as her, a teenager He tells her he's having a hard time at home He's struggling to make friends

That he doesn't feel like anybody cares about him And that's about it But again, it doesn't feel that out of the ordinary It wasn't so long ago that Esther was pretending to be a little squeaker Her cell phone line

So a bit of anonymity is no big deal amongst friends We gameed And trusted him

Plus she's nearly always in your shot of her mum, Grace

She was always out in the living room with that So I could always hear what everyone was saying And what they were doing and how they were talking to each other You could tell it was a bunch of people talking smack to one another I didn't feel like it was a volatile thing

I didn't realize too that there was a lot more computer online stuff

That was me being totally naive

“Esther and her friend came together pretty often”

Hanging out on Skype while they play In between they message each other on Twitter Then he developed feelings for me He asked me to be his online girlfriend Esther's heart sinks

She's not ready for any kind of online relationship Especially not with someone whose face she's barely seen She tries to let him down as gently as possible I really hope that you don't take this the wrong way And that this doesn't change her friendship at all

Because I value our friendship a lot And I love playing with you I love being your friend Please still be my friend Please don't let this ruin things

And sorry I don't feel that way But like I value you and I love you as a friend Like please let's keep being friends Esther holds her breath Hoping she's done enough to spare his feelings

And save their friendship But as soon as I'd rejected him It was hostile immediately The switch had flipped If I can't have you

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But I always have a running list of things

I need to do around my apartment that I swear I'm going to get to You know I have art that's framed Hingense the wall but having gone around hanging it Or have these hooks I want to put up in the entryway You know for jackets and bags

Would be super cute But I need to get like a stud finder And I need to get anchors But I don't know which ones to buy So you know just haven't gotten around to it

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I've hired taskers through task grab it for a bunch of stuff over the years I had a tasker painted bedroom for me Another mounted my TV in my living room Perfectly on the wall

“And honestly every time it's the same feeling of relief after work”

Like alright I don't actually have to spend You know six weekends pretending

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The person she thought she knew as a friend Has become anything but He's not talking about his troubled home life anymore Not lamenting about how he has no friends or how nobody seems to understand him She's turned him down and in response he's turned on her

Vicious messages from him start pouring in I don't know how many messages a day Not a ton to start off with But it's every day he's being threatening hostile I'm not responding to his messages

I'm gonna let this die down He's just upset right now Maybe he's gonna calm down and I'll be fine I didn't tell my mom about it because I was like okay I can deal with this on my own

Then I was like I didn't order this I asked my family Did you order this? No one else ordered it

“And the guy's like well it's paid for so I can't take it back”

And I was like oh okay I thought it was odd And then he messaged me somewhere Skype or something And he was like

Are you enjoying the pizza? Oh that's really creepy

I had never given him my address

I was scared And yes, I did think okay I should have probably like tell my mom at some points I don't really know what to do But I was also like it's just pizza

It's just words He's just angry, it's just a boy on the internet Like it's not that deep Grace asks her daughter what's going on But Esther just brushes her off

She kind of played it off like oh that's kind of weird But someone did that as a joke They think it's funny It didn't seem hostile or aggressive in any way It just struck me as really strange

“I thought that he was just trying to like”

Maybe win me over by sending me a pizza Or like being nice or something Sending pizzas to people is kind of a classic internet prank It's innocuous enough

Because I mean after all it's just a pizza

But as much as Esther wants to believe that It's not that big a deal She knows it's not really true This is threatening This is like naseness disguised in I know where you live

The subtle threats don't stop there He texted me and I was like I don't think I gave you my phone number And confused and a little concerned This is not just unskip anymore

This is not just on Twitter anymore This is not just video games anymore Esther's tried to give him the benefit of the doubt But it's gone way beyond that now She's feeling sick with anxiety over what he's going to say

Or do next So she decides to cut him off I can just block him That's what they tell you to do

They're like oh turn off the screen

Just shut it off You know walk away Fine So that's what I did I was like all right

I'm going to block him It escalated very quickly after I had blocked him Pizza guy shows up again And this was maybe a week later And I was like again

Okay, I'm not accepting it this time And then as I'm rejecting this order from this pizza guy Another pizza guy shows up from another pizza shop And he shows up at the pizza And then at some point

There was like every pizza shop that existed Pizza Hut Dominoes Papa Johns Little Seasers

Name it And they were there And some of them had a lot of pizza There was a pizza guy standing there with 12 pizzas And I was like what

Grace is already starting to grasp That something is not right here Well Esther's still frantically trying to contain everything Like any teenager She's also terrified of owning up to the situation

She's found herself in I was so much more scared about getting in trouble than I was about fixing the situation So Esther is still keeping her mom grace in the dark About the harassment

But it's all going to be fine Right? She just needs to wait it out I thought that I would be able to get through to him I thought that he's got to see eventually

But her former friend has no intention of stopping He started making a bunch of different Google accounts to message me All kinds of threatening messages from all kinds of numbers Like hey, you spawned I'm not going to stop messaging you

I'm not going to stop until you answer You can't get away from me And then that's when I told my mom I was like, this guy is messaging me I can't get away from him

This isn't okay Can we go get a new phone or something Like a new sim card? Can I change my number? What can we do?

We go and we get a new phone And we get my number changed And we get home And literally like as soon as we get home I've got this brand new phone

brand new number And I get a text message from him So you think it was going to be that easy

“My heart just sinks out of my butt, honestly”

I was like, oh my gosh How is he doing all of this?

Everywhere she turns, he seems to be there

“But then he starts coming for her mother Grace too”

He said, I have access to your bank accounts and your bills But weirdly, he doesn't take anything from them I don't know if it was stupidity on his part Or smart on his part to not steal the money And I had changed my password

And he went in there and changed it again And he changed it to something derogatory And he did that to several of my accounts That I had online So he clearly had the tech to get in there

And do that It was a really strange exertion of control It was really strange I thought, why? What's the motivation other than to say

Hey, I can get in here and mess with your life Any time I want There's no reason for this Like why?

“Because I don't want to be your girlfriend”

This is not a normal reaction As the threats and the pizza's continue to roll in Esther's still not replying Hoping that her silence will eventually let the message sink in Hoping that he'll just move on

But he's always there in the back of her mind

He already knows my name He already knows my location He already knows all these things that I haven't even given to him Now I'm definitely scared This isn't just messing around

Like he's got really bad intentions What's the point of this? Coffee in his best form With the new Cuba One capsule machine from Shibu In every Cuba capsule, you can get from special versions

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What is anyone hearing what I'm hearing? And even more heartbreaking The uncertainty of not knowing is a form of agony From Sony Music Entertainment and novel This is Cut Color Kill

I'm Jonathan Hirsch Cut Color Kill is available now on the bench Search for it wherever you get your podcast To start listening today Subscribers to the bench can listen to all episodes

All at once And free As Grace blinks into a blinding beam of light Her hands are raised high in the air She's standing before an army of cops in her front yard

It's like 11 degrees outside It's freezing and of course we didn't plan to go outside So we're not dressed for being outside Police officers slowly approach her and her partner After a few 10 moments they allow them to lower their hands

Then they tell Grace they need to sweep the house I like what all my children and their friends are in there Grace's daughter Esther has some friends staying over She's got a house full of teenagers that's about to be overrun By heavily armed cops

They're like we'll be respectful but we do have to clear the house And make sure everything's okay and all the children are safe They made a stand out there with them while they swept the house I was asleep I heard police you need to wake up

And I like kind of pulled the covers over my hand I thought it was a dream that I was like What the heck? What is going on? They're me alone And then they said it again more loudly

I kind of jolted out of bed and I look over And there's a cops standing next to me with a gun in his hand Like a really big one I'm terrified I have no clue what's happening

And then they bring us out into the living room

The whole family, plus all the kids friends who are staying over

are gathered in the living room

“That's when the police tell them that they received a call from someone”

Saying that he'd broken into their house With an AR-15 rifle And 250 rounds of ammunition That he'd tied up five hostages and put duck tape over their mouths Then he demanded $20,000 in cash and said he would kill one hostage

Every two hours until he got it One of the policemen played a recording And he said do any of you recognize this voice Do you know who this person was? You could see the color almost drained from Esther's face

She said, "Oh my gosh, I know who that is." I recognized his voice because we've been Skype calls Or video game calls

I was just like, "Oh no."

I was just trying to be nice, trying to be helpful But I'm talking to a stranger on the internet The reality of how unsafe it was kind of hit me The police want to know just how much Esther really knows about this online stranger

“So I just told the cops everything that I knew at the time”

I was like, "I only know him online." And like he sent me pizzas I didn't know how scary he was Now Esther is in no doubt And neither is her mom Grace

It felt like it was just so hate-filled It felt very violating And just I couldn't understand that line of thinking To treat someone else's life like that I just, that's so crazy to me

Swattings had like kind of been a thing

But I don't need heard about them from major streamers I didn't know that random people were doing it to other random people There's a dangerous new prank going on And it's putting innocent people in the crosshairs Well, it's called swatting swatting

If you're a gamer or just chronically online, you'll have heard of swatting It's been on the FBI's radar since at least 2008

“But by the time Esther is swatted, it's warped into a toxic craze”

Writing moments for a couple last spring As a swatting surrounded their apartment with guns drawn It's a kind of prank call Where you fake an emergency So serious that it's all that guaranteed

To get a special weapons and tactics or swatting response An active shooter, a bomb threat Something that suggests an imminent threat to life Or mass casualties Something that's designed to get armed cops to scramble

And storm the target's property Takes riot gear tear gas, flash bangs, and heavy duty firearm When you see the swat team, you know it's serious It became more and more popular within gaming communities Especially targeting streamers

By 2011, it was estimated that about 400 swattings were happening Every year in the United States Often a swatter tries to time calling in a fake threat While a gamer is streaming That way they get to watch the swatting happening live on camera

And get their kicks while police battered down the door And tackle their poor, bewildered victim to the ground Oh, this isn't good I think we're getting spotted Get the ground

I'd like to back To the people that engage in swatting, it's the ultimate high stakes prank Trolling in its final form To the police, it's a crime One of the most extreme forms of false reporting

And to the rest of us, including Esther It's a life-threatening gamble He's sending a swat team here We could have gotten hurt They could have gotten hurt

And make no mistake people have gotten seriously hurt In 2017, two call-of-duty players Called Casey Viner and Shane Gaskell got into an argument Reportedly over a wager worth just $1.50 Viner threatened to have Gaskell swatted

And reached out to a guy called Tyler Barris A known swatter to make it happen Barris then threatened Gaskell Telling him a swatting is coming Gaskell responds by sending an address in Wichita

Saying, "Please try some shit, I'll be waiting" Barris then called the police He told him he'd shot his father And was holding the rest of his family hostage He also told him he'd poured gasoline all over the house

And was thinking of setting it on fire Within minutes, police had the house surrounded As the panicked resident made his way outside A warning, the next clip you hear might be distressing Keith, walk this way

He hadn't lived there in a year

“The current resident at that time was a man named Andrew Finch, a father of two”

He didn't know Gaskell, Viner, or Barris And he wasn't a gamer He'd simply answered his door only to see a swat team in his front yard And ten seconds later, he was shot He died later at the hospital

All stemming from an argument over a video game And a dollar fifty

Thankfully, Grayson Esther's local police department

Were able to make contact with them before anyone was hurt It could have been so much worse

“We have guns, we would have defended ourselves”

If we thought someone was breaking into our home, I mean that was absolute insanity The police take statements from Grayson Esther and tell them They're going to open an investigation into the false report But they seem kind of pissed off at Esther They made me feel like it was my fault

I tried to explain to them Like, I was already kind of a public figure online And I streamed and like if people wanted to They can kind of get your information People can find your address, people can do all kinds of stuff

I didn't ask for this, I don't know how to prevent this Nobody knows anything about online security at this point Because it's still very new and not taken seriously They were just like, don't let it happen again It just didn't feel like they were working on it from our perspective

It felt like kind of nothing What Grayson Esther don't know is that about 1,400 miles away in a small town just outside of Atlanta There's at least one cop who's been waging all out war against Esther's swatter for months 6, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 I started tracking back all these different cases that he's done

Sergeant Ben Finley I never liked losing

You know what I mean? I never liked having bad people beat me

Coming up on you are next I am going to find out who did this I can't believe what I just saw Jesus Christ, he's serious The motivation from to do these things is to feel like he's power over these women

It's part of like a controlled harassment campaign Very aggressive and sociopathic The hair is on the back of your neck go up

“If you want to ruin your life, he really cut”

This is you, our next, an original production of Sony Music Entertainment and novel Hosted by me, Lealexander Lea Meyer is our senior producer Varity DeCalla is our assistant producer, Sandra Schmoulli is our editor Production management from Shuri Houston, Joe Savage and Charlotte Wolf

For novel, our executive producer is Max O'Brien From Sony Music Entertainment, our executive producers are Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch Story development by Nell Gray Andrews, Willard Foxton and Selena Metta who is director of development for novel Special thanks to Carolyn Scherlevin at Miller-Koresnick Raymond LLP

and to Ford Collier who performed the woodwind for our theme music and a big thanks to the whole Sony Music Entertainment team