I've kept this story to myself the last couple years mainly out of embarrassment because I was unable to catch the suspect, but it's been on my mind so I wanted to share with the GS to get opinions.
Note: I retired after 20 years as a LEO and the last 10 of those centered around investigations. I've seen some weird stuff and been blessed with solving some strange cases, but this one stumps me to this day and it happened to me.
This is gonna be long....my apologies.
It began approximately three years ago. My family and I lived in small town TX in a nice two story home in a good neighborhood. (For those of you that know me, I'd appreciate you not mentioning the town name.)
There was a small house behind ours and our driveways were close to each other. An older couple (70's) in town purchased that house and remodeled it. They had hopes of their children moving back to town but that didn't happen so it sat vacant which we didn't mind one bit. The owner would come over to chat when he would visit and saw me working in the garage and he was a nice man who loved hunting and we would talk regularly. He would let me park my large trailer in the drive when we would load for hunting trips and in exchange he might call from time to time to have me check something. One day I was in the garage and he walked over to chat. He asked me if I had been in the house (I didn't have a key) or had seen anyone inside it. I did not. He then held out a round object in his hand and asked me if I knew what it was and I said that I did not. He said that it was hanging on the wall where the thermostat once was. We looked it up and it was a "Nest" thermostat control. As I searched it on my phone I saw that it was cell phone compatible and it's common purpose was to be able to control the air temp while away from the house via a cell phone app.
Now personally, I was thinking that Alzheimer's may be setting in and that he had the unit changed and then forgot and was being suspicious of his own forgotten activity. He was very irritated about the whole situation (not at me) and just asked me to keep a closer watch on the place. He said that he was going to put the unit back on the wall and have it replaced soon. He contacted me a few days later and said that the Nest Unit was gone and that the original Honeywell unit was sitting on the couch when they came back to the house. This struck me as even more strange, but after a little while I forgot about it and just chalked it up to him being old.
Fast forward a year. I retired from LEO work and took a job in the city. My wife did the same and we decided to put our hose up for sale and make the move. Fuel and lack of sleep were killing us so we rented a furnished condo to stay at during the week and being that it was the summer we took the kids with us during the week. We left our house fully furnished so it would be staged for the realtor and went back home every other weekend or so. We arrived one Friday evening and our son went upstairs and then hollered for us to come up that someone had been in his room. He is extremely OCD with cleanliness and tidiness and his room always looks like it is ready for a magazine picture. His bed is made and creased the same every morning no matter what. We went upstairs and he pointed to his bed and it had been made, but definitely not the way he does it and no where to the same level of attention to detail that is his norm.
I called the realtor (know him personally) and asked if he had shown the house to anyone with little kids thinking maybe they ran upstairs and jumped on the bed or something, causing someone to have to re-make it. He said that he had not.
It was warmer than usual upstairs so I went to check the upstairs thermostat and to my shock there was a Nest unit on the wall in the place where our Honeywell unit was previously. All the thoughts of what my neighbor had told me flooded back into my mind and rage erupted in my head thinking of someone in my home uninvited. I immediately called all the kids up and told them to check their rooms and let me know if anything was out of place. I then heard a kid yell "dad" from the upstairs bathroom and I ran in there to see what they had found. They pointed up the the ceiling and I looked up to see an AC vent being held on to the ceiling by a screw in one side and packing tape on the other. I immediately recognized that this was not the ac vent that belonged there due to its color and different size.
At this point I'm feeling like Twilight ZONE and getting more angry by the minute. I went downstairs to get a tools to remove the vent and when I opened the closet in the laundry, there lay the AC vent from upstairs and the roll of packing tape. I went back upstairs and swapped the vents back and looked for a camera or something hidden in the vent but could find nothing. I then continued my search of the house. In two rooms of the upstairs there was sheetrock dust on two desks that had ac vents above them. Marks on the bolts showed that those vents had been removed and replaced as well.
We had a third story attic with a drop ladder access from one of the upstairs rooms so I went up there just to look around. When I walked up I noticed that our boxes had been moved. I saw a piece of clothing balled up. I picked it up and it was a pair of large navy blue military coveralls with patches removed. I walked further and laying on the floor was a small black woman's slip. The size was very small like a girl would wear or maybe a woman under 5' tall and 100 pounds or so (not matching anyone in our house). This slip was cut on one side all the way up to near the arm-pit area. Near the slip was a black elbow length lace glove. All three clothing items did not belong to us and we had never seen them before.
I set up game cameras all around the house and never caught anyone or anything suspicious. I called NEST and they assured me the unit could not be used to listen or video record anything, but only control temperature. I was at a complete loss and still am. The clothing leads me to believe something bad was going on, but no proof.
My neighbor (the old man) later caught another neighbor on game camera coming on the back porch and using a towel to unscrew his porch light. We looked into him a bit and found that he was a tech-guy who repaired computers from his home for a living. He had lived in the same house for 10 years or longer. When the police confronted him about the game cam pic, he said that the light was keeping him up at night and he decided to unscrew it. He was asked about the NEST and denied it, but within a couple months moved out of town.
Was the strangest thing I ever dealt with and irritates me that I was unable to catch the person involved or at least determine the "whys" of what he was actually doing.
Your thoughts???
Note: I retired after 20 years as a LEO and the last 10 of those centered around investigations. I've seen some weird stuff and been blessed with solving some strange cases, but this one stumps me to this day and it happened to me.
This is gonna be long....my apologies.
It began approximately three years ago. My family and I lived in small town TX in a nice two story home in a good neighborhood. (For those of you that know me, I'd appreciate you not mentioning the town name.)
There was a small house behind ours and our driveways were close to each other. An older couple (70's) in town purchased that house and remodeled it. They had hopes of their children moving back to town but that didn't happen so it sat vacant which we didn't mind one bit. The owner would come over to chat when he would visit and saw me working in the garage and he was a nice man who loved hunting and we would talk regularly. He would let me park my large trailer in the drive when we would load for hunting trips and in exchange he might call from time to time to have me check something. One day I was in the garage and he walked over to chat. He asked me if I had been in the house (I didn't have a key) or had seen anyone inside it. I did not. He then held out a round object in his hand and asked me if I knew what it was and I said that I did not. He said that it was hanging on the wall where the thermostat once was. We looked it up and it was a "Nest" thermostat control. As I searched it on my phone I saw that it was cell phone compatible and it's common purpose was to be able to control the air temp while away from the house via a cell phone app.
Now personally, I was thinking that Alzheimer's may be setting in and that he had the unit changed and then forgot and was being suspicious of his own forgotten activity. He was very irritated about the whole situation (not at me) and just asked me to keep a closer watch on the place. He said that he was going to put the unit back on the wall and have it replaced soon. He contacted me a few days later and said that the Nest Unit was gone and that the original Honeywell unit was sitting on the couch when they came back to the house. This struck me as even more strange, but after a little while I forgot about it and just chalked it up to him being old.
Fast forward a year. I retired from LEO work and took a job in the city. My wife did the same and we decided to put our hose up for sale and make the move. Fuel and lack of sleep were killing us so we rented a furnished condo to stay at during the week and being that it was the summer we took the kids with us during the week. We left our house fully furnished so it would be staged for the realtor and went back home every other weekend or so. We arrived one Friday evening and our son went upstairs and then hollered for us to come up that someone had been in his room. He is extremely OCD with cleanliness and tidiness and his room always looks like it is ready for a magazine picture. His bed is made and creased the same every morning no matter what. We went upstairs and he pointed to his bed and it had been made, but definitely not the way he does it and no where to the same level of attention to detail that is his norm.
I called the realtor (know him personally) and asked if he had shown the house to anyone with little kids thinking maybe they ran upstairs and jumped on the bed or something, causing someone to have to re-make it. He said that he had not.
It was warmer than usual upstairs so I went to check the upstairs thermostat and to my shock there was a Nest unit on the wall in the place where our Honeywell unit was previously. All the thoughts of what my neighbor had told me flooded back into my mind and rage erupted in my head thinking of someone in my home uninvited. I immediately called all the kids up and told them to check their rooms and let me know if anything was out of place. I then heard a kid yell "dad" from the upstairs bathroom and I ran in there to see what they had found. They pointed up the the ceiling and I looked up to see an AC vent being held on to the ceiling by a screw in one side and packing tape on the other. I immediately recognized that this was not the ac vent that belonged there due to its color and different size.
At this point I'm feeling like Twilight ZONE and getting more angry by the minute. I went downstairs to get a tools to remove the vent and when I opened the closet in the laundry, there lay the AC vent from upstairs and the roll of packing tape. I went back upstairs and swapped the vents back and looked for a camera or something hidden in the vent but could find nothing. I then continued my search of the house. In two rooms of the upstairs there was sheetrock dust on two desks that had ac vents above them. Marks on the bolts showed that those vents had been removed and replaced as well.
We had a third story attic with a drop ladder access from one of the upstairs rooms so I went up there just to look around. When I walked up I noticed that our boxes had been moved. I saw a piece of clothing balled up. I picked it up and it was a pair of large navy blue military coveralls with patches removed. I walked further and laying on the floor was a small black woman's slip. The size was very small like a girl would wear or maybe a woman under 5' tall and 100 pounds or so (not matching anyone in our house). This slip was cut on one side all the way up to near the arm-pit area. Near the slip was a black elbow length lace glove. All three clothing items did not belong to us and we had never seen them before.
I set up game cameras all around the house and never caught anyone or anything suspicious. I called NEST and they assured me the unit could not be used to listen or video record anything, but only control temperature. I was at a complete loss and still am. The clothing leads me to believe something bad was going on, but no proof.
My neighbor (the old man) later caught another neighbor on game camera coming on the back porch and using a towel to unscrew his porch light. We looked into him a bit and found that he was a tech-guy who repaired computers from his home for a living. He had lived in the same house for 10 years or longer. When the police confronted him about the game cam pic, he said that the light was keeping him up at night and he decided to unscrew it. He was asked about the NEST and denied it, but within a couple months moved out of town.
Was the strangest thing I ever dealt with and irritates me that I was unable to catch the person involved or at least determine the "whys" of what he was actually doing.
Your thoughts???
I don’t have any idea, sorry, weird stuff.
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