Uncanny Story

Creative Writing
Fahad Ahmad
Section A
17U00092

The world is full of unexplained events, strange mysteries, and mysterious legends. Howard
worked as a journalist for over 20 years. For most of his career, he worked for local newspapers
in his hometown. The town was small and quiet, and for the most part, his stories were on the on
goings in the local schools and government offices. Then, in later stage of his career, he got a big
story. A woman had gone missing, a local cleaner, and her body had been found raped and
murdered just outside of the town, her body wrapped in plastic bags. The journalist worked closely
with the local police and authorities to cover the murder, with his editor and the residents of the
town started praising him for his attention to detail. Over the next three years, three more women
would go missing, two of them later discovered in the same condition as the first. As he had with
the first murder, Howard covered them all with the same attention to detail, his column quickly
became a crowd favorite amongst the locals. However, police soon began to become suspicious of
his coverage. There were details that were popping up in his stories that police noticed hadn’t been
shared with the public, and they began wondering if the Howard knew who the murderer was and
was keeping it to himself so he could continue to get the best reviews for his media coverage. The
police had been half right. Howard did indeed know who was behind the murders, as he himself
was the killer. For three years, Howard had been living a double life. His wife 31 years old
described him as “quiet and gentle,” and his coworkers at the local newspaper called him
“unbelievably low-key and soft-natured.” Of the four women who disappeared, the three whose
bodies were found displayed signs of being viciously raped, molested and tortured before being
strangled to death with a phone cord. It was the knowledge of that detail that led police to Howard
in the first place. Though they had initially revealed that the women had been strangled, they had
not said with what. Noticing that Howard had correctly named the specific type of phone cord
used, they arrested him on suspicion of murder. After questioning him, they obtained a search
warrant for his home, which revealed further insight into his twisted mind. His home was filled
with pornography, and notes about the crimes. He had been carrying out the murders, then writing
about them in great detail for the paper, as if taunting the police. After three years of covering a
series of murders, police realized that Howard himself was the killer. Finally after matching his
DNA to the semen found on the victims, Howard was arrested. While the police built their case
against him, the former reporter committed suicide in his cell by drowning himself in a bucket of
water. It turned out that the truth was much more sinister.