Fan Favorite - "The Dog and the Golden Gun"

**MrBallen** (0:00)
Today's episode is a fan favorite. The audio and the story has been remastered for today's episode.
On a cold winter night in 1999, a man drove down a dark street towards his house in a small Iowa town. As he was driving, suddenly, he saw something glowing in his headlights and he slammed on the brakes. He got out of his car, and there, in the lights, he saw a dog standing all by herself, and she was making this soft squeaking sound like she was scared. The man slowly approached her, doing his best to keep her calm as he got close. He knew everybody who lived in this neighborhood, and he had never seen this dog before. He finally reached the dog and she seemed very scared, and he petted her a couple of times and still tried to keep her very calm. As he looked her over, she didn't seem hurt, and she also didn't have any tags on her. The man looked up and noticed he was actually right near his house, and so he decided he would just lead the dog to his house and figure out what to do with her after that. So, he coaxed her and she followed him right along, and they went inside his home. And over the next few weeks, the man would do his best to try to locate her owner, not realizing that this dog had not just wandered off. In reality, this dog would become the key that police desperately needed to solve a gruesome crime.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, please sign up for as many telemarketing calls as you possibly can, but don't use your phone number, use the follow buttons phone number.
Okay, let's get into today's story.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:57)
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**MrBallen** (2:27)
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On January 20th, 1999, 28-year-old John Helble sat at a table in his trailer home in the small town of North Liberty, Iowa staring down at a gun. But this was not just any gun. This was a classic old revolver from the 1950s that had seen better days. And so John was intent on restoring it to its former glory. So he picked up a gunsmith screwdriver, which is a small screwdriver with a hollow ground tip, and slowly began taking pieces of the revolver apart. Then once he had done that, he began cleaning the pieces and removing rust that had collected over the years.
John knew restoring a gun like this, at least restoring it the right way, would be slow, painstaking work. And that's actually one of the reasons he loved doing it so much. John had a collection of over 40 classic and customized guns. And when he was working on them, it felt like the rest of the world just disappeared. Somebody could be in the room with him and he'd forget they were even there. That's how focused he'd become on restoration projects. And staying focused had not always been easy for John.
Not long after he had graduated high school and enrolled in college about 10 years earlier, John had gotten involved with drugs, both as a user and also as a dealer. He was frenetic and all over the place, and so drugs had just caused him a lot of problems. He'd had run-ins with the police and he'd struggled to hold down a job. But over the last couple of years, he'd really tried to make some changes in his life, and that's where restoring and customizing guns came in. It wasn't really about selling them for money. Instead, it was about having an interest in something that he was really good at, and also that helped him stay calm. It was also something he could do entirely by himself, and John loved being on his own, to the point that some people called him a recluse. He had a small circle of friends and family, but he was known to go days at a time without seeing or calling any of them.