‘“Well,” he said, wasting no time, “the first thing to be said is that I lived a blameless life until 1982. Entirely blameless. If you were to plot my life along a graph, morally speaking, you would see a very flat line for the first 37 years, then one very sharp spike in the middle, followed by another completely flat line right up until the present day.”

“Given,” I said, “that that seems to be the case – ”

“Oh, it is the case,” he said.

“Well, I thought we might try to talk about why it happened.”

“Fine,” he said. “But you must remember that this was a financial situation. It wasn’t what you might call irrationality, or lack of control. There was a problem to be solved. And you might well ask, well, why solve it using this particular technique? And that’s a legitimate question. But it wasn’t an act of madness.”

After the call ended, I sat on the bench, staring at the words I had scribbled in my notebook as we spoke. I circled the word “problem”, and then the word “technique”.’

• Hunting Ghislaine … John Sweeney examines how Ghislaine Maxwell became a convicted sex trafficker.


• The Coming Storm … An attempt to understand QAnon and it’s history.

‘A major problem for Jeffrey MacDonald, Thornhill said, was Jeffrey MacDonald:

“He was a very egotistical person, and it absolutely came through. When he took the stand and started that phony crying, we were astonished. It was like bad acting. When we got to the jury room, we weren’t allowed to discuss it, and we didn’t, but we’re looking at each other, and it was like, ‘What just happened out there?’

“You know, there was testimony that a month after [the murders], MacDonald had sex with a nurse. The defense objected, and it was stricken from the testimony, but how do you strike that from your mind?”

That was the thing, Thornhill said. The jurors felt it: There was something fundamentally wrong with Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald.

‘Two weeks after the letter arrived, Maria stopped by the house to look at some paint samples and check the mail. She recognized the thick black lettering on a card-shaped envelope and called the police. “Welcome again to your new home at 657 Boulevard,” The Watcher wrote. “The workers have been busy and I have been watching you unload carfuls of your personal belongings. The dumpster is a nice touch. Have they found what is in the walls yet? In time they will.”

This time, The Watcher had addressed Derek and Maria directly, misspelling their names as “Mr. and Mrs. Braddus.” Had The Watcher been close enough to hear one of the Broadduses’ contractors addressing them? The Watcher boasted of having learned a lot about the family in the preceding weeks, especially about their children. The letter identified the Broadduses’ three kids by birth order and by their nicknames – the ones Maria had been yelling. “I am pleased to know your names now and the name of the young blood you have brought to me,” it said.

After their arrests, over the course of nearly nine combined hours of interviews, they claim that they were compelled to kill her by a monster they had encountered online. When discovered, the girls were making their way to him, heading to Wisconsin’s Nicolet National Forest on foot, nearly 200 miles north. They were convinced that, once there, if they pushed farther and farther into the nearly 700,000-acre forest, they would find the mansion in which their monster dwells and he would welcome them.

Morgan and Anissa packed for the trip-granola bars, water bottles, photos by which to remember their families. (As Anissa tells a detective, “We were probably going to be spending the rest of our lives there.”) Though they were both a very young, Midwestern twelve, they had been chosen for a dark and unique destiny which none of their junior-high classmates could possibly understand, drawn into the forest in the service of a force much greater and more mysterious than anything in their suburban-American lives. What drew them out there has a name: Slender Man, faceless and pale and impossibly tall. His symbol is the letter X.