Mysterious Voicemail

First off, let me apologize for going over 2 years without any new episodes. While I assumed that Internet Freakshow would go in seasons with bursts of content and some breaks, I didn’t really anticipate 2 full years. I am not going to make excuses, but for those who reached out via Twitter and iTunes reviews, I do want to thank you for keeping me accountable and inspiring me to continue. I’ve got 6 more episodes this season and a renewed interest in keeping this show going, so without further ado, let’s dive into this week’s Freakshow.

On May 4th, 2018, a reddit user named Dementor_of_New posted on /r/RBI (an acronym for Reddit Bureau of Investigation) about a mysterious voicemail his significant other had received on June 9, 2017. The weird thing about this voicemail, although it was sent on June 9, 2017, it was not actually received on the phone until May 4th, 2018. The voicemail contained audio of a woman begging for help. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately depending on how you look at it, the original audio from the call has been removed from the internet and I couldn’t find the original recording.

A user had uploaded a portion of the call to YouTube. I’m going to play it now, but please be advised that, if real, it is pretty disturbing.

Anything not in this snippet, we need to just rely on the transcripts from the original thread. One user hears the woman yelling, “he’s trying to rape me”, or possibly, “he tried to rape me.” The same woman says “Help me. Somebody. Please.”

By 50 seconds into the voicemail, the woman is sobbing hysterically.

At 55 seconds in, she says, “I don’t want to die here”. From 56 seconds to almost 2 minutes is unintelligible sobbing, but the woman is in clear distress. At 1:55, she starts yelling, “please, please” and sobs, clearly in pain.

The woman then screams, “you mother fucker”, followed by the potential abuser/kidnapper/rapist coming into the room. The culprit is very difficult to understand, and from here on out people are torn on what is said, and what is happening. Some think she’s yelling about her baby, causing them to wonder if this was a pregnant woman being operated on to remove her baby. This is all speculation due to the difficulty in understanding the audio.

One user believes there are 3 people in the room at this point. The female victim and 2 male perpetrators. This user believes the males are talking to each other, saying things like, “it’s big daddy pimpin yo” and “tie her up again”.

Other than that, the transcription of the 3 minutes contain a lot of inaudible crying, yelling, or voices that are hard or impossible to understand.

So with the disturbing phone call out of the way, we have a lot of questions that need to be answered about this call.

First, let’s talk about why this particular phone received the voicemail nearly 1 year after it was sent. Unfortunately, there’s no good answer here. The phone number was not new, so it’s not like the voicemail was lost in the system after a deactivation and returned shortly after. In fact, the phone number that received the voicemail was 10 years old. The number the voicemail came from was also unrecognized by the recipient, obviously. It came from a 480 area code, which is in or around Phoenix, Arizona. A particularly clever Reddit sleuth did find a news story about a bust that was made in June 2017, the same month and year this voicemail was reportedly sent, about the arrest of a man named Raymond Burk who had allegedly used the internet to recruit and kidnap a 17-year-old. He then sexually abused her and told her he was going to keep her as “his little pet”.

This isn’t the worst theory in the world honestly, because she was eventually freed with the use of a cell phone. The Salt Lake Tribune says, “The teen eventually used Burk’s friend’s phone to send out messages on social media and alert police to her situation. Burk allegedly tried to move her to a different residence when he learned police were coming, but the teen saw police and made contact with them before she was moved.”

Is it possible that the victim got access to a phone once, and maybe she had done it before, too? Maybe the next time, she contacted the authorities who could help rather than a random number with a broken voicemail system?

The article also mentions that Burk took her to his drug dealer’s residence, where the dealer assaulted her in exchange for marijuana. Is it possible these are the two voices heard on the voicemail?

Reddit sleuths also followed up on the origins of the number that sent the mysterious voicemail. This user, satellitecookie, received the phone number via direct message to avoid making it public, and followed it back to a man with a “generic Asian name”. No further information was given. I couldn’t find any details on the drug dealer that Raymond Burk took his victim to visit, but maybe she used his phone in this incident?

Another user, coconutmartini, claims to be a “paranormal enthusiast, aka, paranormalist, specializing in EVP recordings”. This user claims that the female may be using or wearing a bluetooth device which is making the call. He or she claims the OP couldn’t be the one who made the audio. He or she also claims that the audio is a true audio recording, not fake or staged.

In terms of evidence that this voicemail is real, this is about all the evidence we have really. A digital audio file that sounds completely terrifying along with a sort of skimpy story of its origins.

But what about the possibility that it is a hoax?

Please stay tuned for a word from our sponsors, after which we’ll talk about the possibility that this is a hoax.

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Ok, so is this a hoax? This is where it gets interesting, because the same user, coconutmartini, who claims it is not fake or staged, also claims that there is a splice in audio at 44 seconds in. It is subtle and easy to miss, almost undetectable according to this user. But doesn’t any editing of the audio at all discredit the whole story? Why edit an audio file, then deliver it to someone’s voicemail? If this is a genuine phone call, it doesn’t make any sense at all that there’s a splice in it.

If this is a hoax, then the previous user, satellitecookie, who traced the phone number must be in on the hoax or possibly an alternate account of the OP, created to answer the obvious question of who owns the number attached to the voicemail while also not needing to answer any additional questions about it.

In fact, other users offered to help pinpoint the location of the phone using the phone number, but these users were ignored. Why would OP send the number to one user but not all?

But the biggest piece of evidence I could find about this call being a hoax is that the OP had posted in /r/AskReddit, a general question-and-answer forum, a thread with the topic, “My girlfriend's birthday is coming up, I want to assemble a audio file with all these sounds playing. They will be coming in and out with varying volumes and fade. I will play this at midnight on her birthday.”

The post read, “What are the most stressful sounds you know? Or sounds you think would be appropriate for this kind assholery.”

So here’s a user, asking on Reddit about creepy and stressful sounds, only to receive a mysterious voicemail full of creepy and stressful sounds sometime later. That sounds a little suspicious to me.

The original poster claims to have contacted the police with the voicemail and all the details necessary. We have no way to verify if that happened of course, but we can certainly hope. If this is real, I hope the voicemail served to help release the woman who is in clear pain from the sounds of the audio.

But I personally think the audio is fake. The only 2 pieces of evidence I need to confirm this: The splice in the audio and the previous question about creepy audio. This may just be a convenient excuse for me to ignore something that would be horrible traumatic and uncomfortable to believe it were true. I sleep better at night assuming this audio is fake, but fortunately for me the assumptions aren’t unfounded. When it comes down to it, the only proof that this is real is a super creepy audio file posted to the internet. We don’t have confirmation it’s a voicemail at all, much less the rest of the story about it being delivered by an unknown number nearly a year after it was recorded.

If fake, we can only speculate the motivations of the original poster. But isn’t that freaky in and of itself? What motivates anonymous people to make up scary stories, and other anonymous people to pick these apart to either believe or dismiss?

As for Raymond Burk and the trauma he inflicted on this victim, he received 12 years in prison and lifetime probation in exchange for pleading guilty to child sex trafficking and multiple accounts of sexual abuse of a minor.

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