Swindled

Mike Boudet (0:30)

And shake them together, bringing them like a bell. Usually one or two of her neighbor's cats would pop out of somewhere softening her day, but today, nothing. It's quiet. It's eerie. She tries to focus as she searches for the right key, but unease prickles at her skin when she hears a truck pull up behind her. She turns to see her neighbor's on-again, off-again boyfriend pulling into the driveway. She watches as he gets out and starts walking towards the front door. Her voice wavers slightly when she stops him with a polite hello.

Hey, haven't seen Jaime in a while. Tell her I say hi.

The man doesn't miss a step as he responds. You won't be seeing much of Jaime anymore, he says quickly. She doesn't quite hear what he says next because Her mind immediately starts racing.

Clenching at her chest. It's something about Jaime having a new job with long work hours, but the words barely land. Carol trusts her intuition. And in this moment, her intuition is screaming at her. Something is wrong.

Doubt courses through her, twisting her neighborly smile into a. Mask.

She ends the chat with the usual pleasantries and steps inside her home. Once the door closes, she stands there, back against the wall, thinking. She knows Jaime. She knows she had spent months saving for a trip. But now she'd be gone for weeks all of a sudden. In their neighborhood, the routine is obvious. Carol sees it all, the same cars, the same people, the same schedules. Everything is the same except for John Chapman.

She's seen John coming and going from Jaime's townhouse for weeks, but no Jaime, not even once. At first, she didn't think anything of it, but now, with him seemingly living there, she couldn't excuse the deviation from the routine. Suddenly, all the trash he'd been throwing out seemed a bit ominous. Carol pulls her phone out of her pocket, her pulse quickening. She opens up Facebook and searches through Jaime's friends list. She finds her best friend, Danielle, and messages her. She hopes wherever Jaime is, that she's okay.

Welcome to Sword and Scale Nightmares. True Crime for Bedtime, where Nightmare Begins Now.

Daniel grew up with Jaime Feden. They were less than a year apart in age, and she considered her sort of a little sister in more ways than one. Jaime was now 33 and independent. She lived by herself in a townhouse on Timber Ridge Drive in Bethel Park, a Pittsburgh suburb. She worked at an assisted living facility for seniors. And when she wasn't at work, she was at home with her cats. But even though Jaime was independent, Danielle still worried about her. Jaime had been born with Vader syndrome, a rare condition that affects multiple parts of your body before birth. At 33 years old, she stood just over four feet tall and weighed barely 75 pounds. One of her eyes drifted slightly. Her voice stayed high pitched and childlike. Her sentence is broken by deep breaths between words. Multiple surgeries throughout her life left her with a steel rod and fused vertebrae in her spine, forcing her to turn her entire body instead of just her neck. Jaime was small, trusting, and vulnerable.

Danielle's phone chimes with a notification. She glances at it even though she's busy. It's a Facebook message from... Carol? She recognizes the name only as Jaime's neighbor. She stops and taps the icon, and the app opens. Her hand starts to tremble as she reads Carol's message. She already suspects something is off with Jaime.

Earlier, she'd gotten a message from Jaime saying she probably wasn't coming back to Pittsburgh. The message didn't feel like Jaime. Danielle's brow furrowed with confusion and worry. It just didn't sound like Jaime at all. Jaime has a house, a job, bills, and pets to care for. How could she just disappear?

Unease coils inside Danielle, making the message impossible to shake. Now that she's reading, John Chapman is back. But Jaime isn't. Her body fills with dread. She taps the icon and calls Carol immediately. She listens as Carol explains all the trash, Jaime's absence, and John Chapman's explanation. You won't be seeing much of Jaime anymore.

The words made Danielle shiver, so the two concerned women decided to test Jaime. They took turns messaging her. Carol asked Jaime to return the red purse she lent her. Jaime responded as any person would, but you see, that was the problem. Carol never lent a purse to Jaime.

Danielle reached out to let Jaime know that her uncle Ralph had passed away. Jaime responded that she couldn't attend the funeral because she and John needed to focus on their relationship. Kind of a weird thing to say, no? I mean, you can't attend a funeral because you're working on your relationship? What? When Danielle reads this message, her stomach sinks. She starts shaking her head in disbelief. Because if Jaime were really the person texting back, she would know that she didn't have an uncle named Ralph.