On September 12th, 2015, 26-year-old Alyssa Carter entered the thick of the forest near Mount Shasta and disappeared without a trace.

4 weeks of searching yielded no results.

The woman seemed to have vanished into thin air.

On October 10th, an unnatural silence suddenly fell in a remote sector of the forest where a team of loggers was marking dead wood.

And then it was broken by singing.

It wasn’t a cry for help, but a horse mechanical melody coming from the crown of a giant Douglas fur tree.

Looking up, the men saw a massive wooden cage suspended 40 ft above the ground.

Through the cracks in the boards, a woman stared at them, extremely emaciated, wearing dirty rags, her face covered with soores and dust.

Despite her terrible condition, it was the missing Alyssa Carter who put her in this trap above the ground.

On September 12, 2015, the morning at the foot of Mount Shasta was surprisingly clear and cold.

The thermometers at the Ranger Station read 48° F.

It was the kind of fall weather that makes the air feel taut as a string, and the visibility reached tens of miles.

It was on this day that 26-year-old Alyssa Carter decided to escape the world.

She worked as the chief administrator of a large water park in Reading.

Her entire summer had been a constant buzz.

Children screaming, water running, conflicts with staff, and endless piles of reports.

In a conversation with her mother the day before the trip, Alyssa admitted that the only thing she wanted was absolute sterile silence.

She was not looking for adventure or extreme.

She was looking for peace.

At 8:00 15 minutes in the morning, a security camera at the entrance to Everett Memorial Highway captured her silver Subaru Forester.

Alyssa was alone.

She was wearing a light olive colored fleece jacket and dark hiking pants.

She confidently drove the car up the serpentine road heading for the popular launch point, the Bunny Flat parking lot, located at an altitude of almost 7,000 ft above sea level.

When she got there, the parking lot was already filled with tourists, climbers, and locals who had come to breathe in the mountain air.

Alyssa parked her car in the far corner away from the main mass of people.

Witnesses who saw her at that moment described the girl as focused.

She checked the contents of her backpack, relaced her shoes, and hung a professional DSLR camera from her neck.

It was her old hobby, landscape photography.

Leaving her tablet and wallet in the car, she took only water, the camera, and the car keys.

Around 11:00 in the morning, a group of students from the University of Oregon descending from horse camp noticed a lone girl.

She had left the main marked trail near the fork in Sand Flat and was moving slowly toward a group of old spruce trees.

One of the students later told investigators that she looked like she was looking for the perfect angle.

The girl stood motionless, adjusting her lens and trying to catch the sun’s rays breaking through the thick needles.

The witnesses clearly remembered her profile and concentrated expression.

They did not speak to her so as not to disturb the very silence she was so protective of.

This was the last confirmed visual contact with Alyssa Carter.

The sun began to set behind the ridge and the temperature plummeted.

The bunny flat parking lot was gradually emptying.

One by one, the cars left the lot, their headlights cutting through the twilight, heading down to the city.

Only the silver Subaru remained in its place, covered with a thin layer of evening frost.

When Alyssa didn’t answer her mother’s third call at 10 p.m., the family raised the alarm.

Alyssa’s father, a former military officer, immediately realized that his daughter, who was punctual and responsible, could not have simply forgotten about her time in the mountains without a good reason.

The Sysu County Sheriff’s Office received a missing person’s report at midnight.

The search operation began at dawn on September 13th.

It was a large-scale mobilization, dozens of volunteers, US Forest Service rangers, and professional search and rescue teams.

But the main bet was made on dog handlers.

The dogs picked up the trail near her car door quite confidently.

The German Shepherds, trained to ignore the sense of other hikers, led the group not up the snowy slopes, where lost hikers usually go, but sharply to the side.

The route indicated by the dogs surprised even experienced rescuers.

The trail led through a dense, thorny manzanita bush, a tough plant with red bark that is extremely difficult for a person to walk through.

This was not a tourist area.

It was a wild abandoned sector of the forest that rested on an old technical clearing that had not been used for more than 20 years.

The branches here were so densely intertwined that the searchers had to cut their way through with machetes.

And a logical question arose.

Why did Alyssa, who just wanted to take pictures of the scenery, go into this jungle? After 2 mi of hard work, the dogs led the group to a small clearing.

There, near the fallen mossy trunk of a giant pine tree, one of the volunteers noticed a black plastic object.

It was the lens cap of a Canon camera.

It was lying on the bright green moss with the clean side up.

There was no dust, dirt, or dew drops on it as if it had fallen there just a few minutes ago.

Although almost 24 hours had passed since the disappearance, the head of the search team ordered everyone to stop and not to trample on the site.

Alyssa’s father, who was shown a photo of the object, immediately recognized the item.

It was the cover of his daughter’s favorite wide-angle lens.

The discovery gave him an instant flash of hope.

If her things were here, she must be somewhere nearby.

Perhaps she twisted her ankle, fell, lost consciousness, and is lying behind this fallen tree.

But this flash of hope turned out to be a cruel trap.

When the dog handlers instructed the dogs to search further, what would later be included in official reports as an abnormal loss of trail occurred, the dogs began circling the area where the lid had been lying.

They winded, poked their noses into the moss, turned back, but refused to go even a foot further.

Alyssa’s trail did not dissipate gradually as it happens when a person walks on stony ground.

It broke off instantly and completely as if the woman had been lifted vertically into the air at that very point near the old pine tree.

The forensic team that arrived at the scene combed every inch of soil within a 50- ft radius.

The pine needles on the ground were soft and they held prints perfectly, but there were only the bootprints of the rescuers themselves.

No signs of a struggle, no tire treads or shoes of an outsider, no broken branches or drops of blood.

The forest around was silent and still.

The lens cap, lying like a foreign body in the middle of the wilderness, was the only material evidence that Alyssa Carter had ever existed in this place.

She entered the forest, took a step away from the path, and dissolved into the silence she had been seeking.

On October 10th, 2015, exactly four weeks have passed since Alyssa Carter disappeared.

For her family, it was a period of painful, deafening silence that ate away at their hopes.

The Syskiu County Sheriff’s Office officially changed the status of the case.

It was transferred to the so-called passive phase.

In the bureaucratic language of law enforcement, this meant that active search teams were no longer combing square by square and detectives were no longer doing fieldwork, limiting themselves to checking rare incoming messages.

The statistics were inexurable.

The chances of finding a person alive in the wild after a month of absence were approaching zero.

Meanwhile, 37 mi north of the Bunny Flat parking lot, the forest lived its own separate life, hidden from human eyes.

This area was designated on the forestry maps as sector E4.

It was located southeast of the small town of Mloud and was considered a wilderness area.

There were no tourist routes, campsites, or observation decks.

The only routes of communication were old logging roads washed out by the autumn rains covered with deep ruts that only heavy machinery could travel.

It was in this square that the contract crew of the logging company worked.

Their task was to sanitize the deadwood before the start of the winter snowfall season.

The work was monotonous and noisy.

At about 13:00 and 30 minutes, Foreman Mike Nelson gave the order to stop the equipment and announced a lunch break.

The hum of the chainsaws died down, and the forest was instantly filled with a ringing, unnatural silence after the mechanical noise.

Workers sat on fallen logs near the pickup truck, pulling out thermoses and paper bags of food.

10 minutes later, one of the team members, a 20-year-old intern named Jacob, went deeper into the woods to relieve himself.

He went deeper into the thicket of giant Douglas furs, where the undergrowth was particularly dense and consisted of tall ferns and young spruce trees.

Later in his testimony, he would note that there was almost no wind that day, and the forest was completely still.

Walking back to the truck, Jacob suddenly stopped.

He thought he heard a sound that did not fit into the picture of wildlife.

It was not the cry of an animal, the creek of a tree, or the sound of bird wings.

It resembled a human voice, but it sounded strange, quiet, monotonous, and rhythmic.

At first, the guy thought it was radio interference on the radio of one of his colleagues, but the sound was not coming from the road.

It was coming from the thicket of old trees.

Jacob called the foreman.

Mike Nelson, a forester with 20 years of experience, was skeptical at first, thinking it was a joke or an acoustic illusion.

However, when the two of them carefully approached a group of century old trees, the sound became clearer and more distinct.

There was no doubt it was singing.

A woman’s voice, extremely horse, weak, on the verge of breaking down, was singing a simple melody without words.

It resembled the work of a broken music box, the mechanism of which was stuck on one note.

The woman was humming the same sequence of sounds in a circle without pauses or emotions.

The worst part was that the sound was not coming from the ground.

It was coming from above.

Looking up, the loggers saw an object that would later become the main physical evidence in a criminal case and shock even experienced FBI agents.

At a height of about 40 feet, almost 12 meters above the ground, a massive structure hung in a branch of an old Douglas fur tree.

It was a cage crudely but securely made of thick pine poles and boards.

It was skillfully disguised by tied spruce branches that had already begun to turn yellow, merging with the bark of the tree.

The structure hung from a complex system of steel cables thrown over a taller branch and swayed slightly.

Mike Nelson, having recovered from his initial shock, folded his palms into a horn and shouted up, “Hey, is someone there?” The response was immediate and eerie.

The singing stopped.

For a few seconds, the forest was completely silent.

The men downstairs were expecting a cry for help, a plea to come down, or at least some kind of dialogue.

But instead, the voice came again.

Now it was louder, clearer with hysterical vibrating notes.

The woman upstairs was not calling them.

She started singing the same melody, but speeding up the tempo as if she was trying to finish it before some invisible threat.

Through the cracks between the boards, the wood cutters noticed movement.

A pale, dirtcovered hand stuck out of the holes.

It was so thin that it resembled a skeletal limb.

The hand began to wave randomly in the air, but it was not a gesture of greeting or call.

The movements were smooth and rhythmic, as if the woman was conducting an invisible orchestra, adjusting to the rhythm of her crazy singing.

Mike Nelson instantly recognized the criticality of the situation.

He realized that any attempt to reach the cage on his own without climbing equipment could be fatal.

The structure looked unstable and the slightest vibration of the trunk could break the tensioned cables.

A fall from a height of 40 ft guaranteed death.

The foreman ordered Jacob to immediately run to the truck, drive to a hill where he could get a satellite phone signal and call 911.

Nelson himself remained under the tree, keeping an eye on the object.

While he waited, his eyes caught another detail that explained how the prisoner had survived for four weeks.

A thin synthetic rope stretched down from the bottom of the cage.

At its end, at the height of a man’s height, an empty plastic milk container with the top cut off swayed in the wind.

It was a primitive elevator for transferring food.

Nelson did not know yet that he had found Alyssa Carter, and he couldn’t understand why she didn’t shout, “Help!” when she saw the living people below, but continued to sing, breaking her voice and looking at him through the cracks of her wooden prison with a hollowess in her eyes.

On October 10th, 2015, at 14 hours 45 minutes, the first patrol crews from the Sysu County Sheriff’s Office reached the perimeter of sector E4.

The location proved so inaccessible that the squad cars had to be abandoned a mile away near a deep eroded ravine that cut across a forest road.

The officers then proceeded on foot, guided by the coordinates transmitted by the loggers via satellite.

What the law enforcement officers saw when they arrived at the scene did not fit into the usual response protocols.

The forest was quiet.

There was no wind, but a continuous horse singing was coming from the crown of a giant Douglas fur.

It was mechanical, devoid of emotion, like a recording on a tape that jammed in a player.

It created a surreal atmosphere.

The sheriff immediately called a special unit with tactical climbing equipment.

An assessment of the area showed that it was impossible to use a fire escape.

The soil under the trees was too soft and covered with a thick layer of pine needles, and the density of the trees did not allow heavy equipment to get closer than a mile.

The only way to escape was to physically climb the tree.

The operation was led by Sergeant James Pototts, a veteran rescue worker with 15 years of experience in the Highlands.

After inspecting the object through binoculars, he immediately identified the main risk.

The cage looked homemade.

Although it was supported by cables, any sudden movement, jerk, or change in the center of gravity could lead to a break in the fasteners.

At 16 hours and 20 minutes, Pots began the climb.

He used special tree claws, gaffs, which were attached to his shoes and allowed him to cut into the bark.

The climb was slow and strenuous.

Each strike of the metal spike on the trunk, each vibration transmitted upward made the wooden structure above his head creek menacingly.

Everyone below held their breath, but the singing upstairs never stopped, drowning out the sounds of the rescue operation.

When Pototts reached the cage level, he turned on his body camera.

This video would later become key evidence in court demonstrating the inhumane conditions of detention.

Inside, curled up in a fetal position on a dirty, damp, soaked blanket, was Alyssa Carter.

She was terribly thin, her skin was an earthy gray, and her lips were chapped to the point of bleeding.

She looked directly at the rescuer, but there was no recognition in her eyes.

Alyssa, I’m Sergeant Pototts.

I’m here to help you.

We’re going to take you down now,” he said in the calmst, steadiest voice possible, trying not to scare the victim.

She did not respond.

She didn’t even blink.

The girl just kept looking through him as if he were transparent and humming the same tune rhythmically.

Pots tried to open the cage door and froze.

At that moment, he realized the full horror of the situation.

It was not just a prison.

It was a coffin.

The door had no lock, latch, or handle.

It was nailed shut with thick, rusty nails from the outside.

Whoever put her in there hadn’t planned for her to get out, not to eat, not to go to the bathroom, not to stretch her legs.

The only opening in the floor was a narrow slit over which hung a block with a rope for transferring water.

Another small hole was crudely cut in the far corner of the cell for sanitary needs.

Alyssa was bricked up alive at a height of 40 ft.

It took the rescuer 20 minutes to carefully millimeter by millimeter trying not to loosen the structure pull out the nails with a nail gun.

The creaking of the metal coming out of the wood was loud, but Alyssa did not react to it.

When the door finally gave way and swung open, the smell from inside hit her nose.

It was a heavy mixture of pine resin, mold, and unwashed human flesh.

Pototts carefully put the harness on Alyssa.

She was as docel as a ragd doll, allowing her arms and legs to be moved, but continued to sing softly, although her voice had almost disappeared and turned into a whisper.

The descent continued for another half hour.

A team of paramedics with stretchers and oxygen equipment was already waiting at the bottom.

The most terrifying moment came when Alyssa’s feet touched the ground.

As soon as she felt the hard surface under the soles of her boots, the singing stopped in mid-sentence.

Absolute silence fell.

Alyssa took a deep convulsive breath as if she was daring to breathe for the first time in a month.

She slowly looked around the crowd of uniformed men.

Her pupils dilated and her eyes rolled back.

She lost consciousness in the medic’s arms.

While the ambulance was transporting Alyssa to the medical center, forensic experts fenced the tree with yellow tape.

The cage remained hanging at the top, a grim monument to human madness that had yet to be examined in detail.

Experts took a drone up to inspect the interior before dismantling it.

Inside, they found a plastic bottle of muddy water and a few dry, moldy crackers.

But the most frightening detail was found on the interior walls.

These were not inscriptions for help or farewell letters.

Long, even rows of vertical lines were scratched on the boards.

It was a calendar.

Alyssa Carter wasn’t just waiting to die.

She was methodically counting down each day of her stay in the sky, turning time into the only thing she could still control.

On October 12th, 2015, the atmosphere in the intensive care unit of the Mount Shasta Medical Center was tense to the point of breaking point.

The room where the rescued Alyssa Carter was kept was guarded around the clock with two police officers on duty at the door recording everyone who entered.

Detective Thomas Blake, the lead investigator in the case, had been in the hospital corridor for more than 5 hours.

He sat on an uncomfortable plastic chair, flipping through preliminary reports and waiting for doctor’s permission to have his first critical interview.

Doctors assessed the victim’s physical condition as serious but stable.

In the medical record, the chief physician recorded the terrible consequences of a month’s detention, a loss of 9 kg of weight, critical dehydration, and multiple deep bed sores.

Of particular concern was the atrophy of the muscles in her legs.

Due to the inability to straighten up to her full height in the cramped cell, the woman’s tendons had shrunk and she was physically unable to bend her knees.

However, the results of the blood toxicology test surprised the investigators.

They were absolutely clean.

The kidnapper used neither drugs nor strong sedatives to hold the victim down.

His methods of control, as it turned out later, were much more primitive, cruel, and effective than any chemical.

The biggest problem was the psyche.

During the first 48 hours, Alyssa did not say a single word.

She did not respond to her name, ignored the presence of her parents who were crying at her bedside, and did not answer the simple questions of the officer on duty.

She lay absolutely still, staring with a glassy gaze at a single point on the white ceiling.

However, from time to time, for no apparent reason, her lips would begin to tremble, and a quiet, barely audible horse humming of the same melody that the rescuers had heard in the forest would escape from her throat.

The breakthrough in understanding the nature of this phenomenon happened by chance during a routine morning round.

The nurse on duty came into the ward to change the IV system and noticed that the patients lips were very dry and cracked.

Guided by the usual care, the woman poured water into a transparent glass and slowly brought it to Alyssa’s face, saying gently, “Drink, my dear.

You need to regain your strength.

” The patients reaction was immediate and frightening.

Alyssa abruptly flinched away from the glass as far as her weak muscles would allow and pressed her back into the headboard.

Her eyes widened with panicked anim animalistic terror.

She looked at the clean water not as a salvation but as a mortal threat and then beginning to tremble slightly, she began to sing.

This time it was not a humming sound.

She sang loudly, trying to articulate each sound clearly, doing her best not to fake it.

Even though her broken voice was constantly failing, she sang without taking her eyes off the glass of water as if waiting for permission.

At that moment, the psychiatrist on duty, Dr.

Alan Wei, ran into the room, alarmed by the loud noises.

After assessing the situation in a split second, he stopped the nurse who was trying to calm the girl with a sharp gesture and ordered everyone present to freeze.

Don’t give her any water until she’s finished, the doctor said quietly but authoritatively.

The singing continued for about a minute.

Only when Alyssa had sung the melody to the last note and stopped breathing heavily and raggedly did Dr.

Wei slowly with his hands visible, hand her a glass.

Alyssa snatched it with trembling hands, spilling the liquid on her hospital gown and drank it all in one gulp, choking on the water.

After that, the glass fell out of her hands, and the girl crawled back into the corner of the bed and closed her eyes tightly.

An hour later, in the hallway, Dr.

Wei explained the situation to Detective Blake.

His diagnosis sounded like an indictment of the kidnapper’s humanity.

“It’s a classic conditioned reflex, Detective,” the doctor said, wiping his glasses.

“Just like Pavlov’s experiments with dogs, only implemented with incredible cruelty.

She’s been trained.

The water and food in that cage were a reward solely for the perfect performance of this song.

Medical science says that such a deep reflex does not occur instantly.

It takes dozens, if not hundreds of repetitions to consolidate it.

Alyssa was not just being held back.

Her personality was being broken systematically and methodically.

That evening, Alyssa Carter spoke for the first time.

Detective Blake entered the room alone, leaving his partner outside the door.

He turned on the recorder and placed it on the edge of the bedside table.

The girl’s voice was quiet, dry, and rustling like the sound of autumn leaves rubbing together.

She said she had never seen her jailer’s face.

The captor always came late at night or stood at the very foot of the tree in the so-called blind spot under the bottom of the cell.

To communicate, he used only a primitive system of blocks to lift a basket of scanty supplies.

“At first, I screamed,” Alyssa whispered as the magnetic tape recorded her every word.

“I screamed and cried for 2 days straight.

He didn’t come.

Then it started raining and I licked the water off the damp boards to survive.

And then he came back.

He never spoke to me with his voice.

He just turned on an old portable cassette player.

A woman’s voice would come out of the speaker and sing this melody.

Alyssa paused for a long moment, her fingers white from how hard she was clutching the edge of the sheet.

Then he said only one phrase, “Sing like her.

If you sing exactly like her, you will get a drink.

” The first two weeks turned into a hell of mistakes and punishments.

Alyssa said that if she lost her rhythm, mixed up her notes, or her voice trembled, the basket of water that was slowly rising up would suddenly stop halfway up, and then it would plummet down, spilling the precious liquid into the grass.

He deliberately starved it with thirst until it ceased to be human and became a perfect living instrument.

“Was he a psycho?” Blake asked cautiously, trying not to put pressure on his victim.

Alyssa looked up at him, her eyes showing a glimmer of meaning for the first time.

“He was sad,” she answered, a description that frightened the detective more than any description of aggression or rage.

“He told me that his mom doesn’t sleep well and that this song is the only thing that helps her.

He didn’t want to hurt me.

He wanted to use me.

” These words changed the course of the investigation.

Now the police had not just a description of the maniac’s actions, but a clear motive and a specific clue.

An old lullabi that could lead them to a man who had lost his mother and his mind trying to bring back the past through the suffering of another person.

On October 15th, 2015, 3 days after the successful rescue operation, the California State Police Forensic Unit began the complex process of dismantling the structure in sector E4.

This was not just a logging operation, but a collection of physical evidence.

The cage was lowered as carefully as possible using a system of industrial winches to avoid damaging the integrity of the frame.

When the massive wooden object finally touched the ground and the experts were able to examine it up close, even veteran forensic experts were impressed with the quality of workmanship.

What looked like a crude prison from afar turned out to be an engineering masterpiece up close.

Detective Thomas Blake, who was present at the evidence storage site during the initial inspection, wrote in his report that this building had nothing to do with the chaotic buildings of mentally unstable people.

It was the work of a top class professional.

The frame was made of seasoned larch, a wood known for its resistance to moisture and decay.

Such material is not found in the forest.

It had to be specially harvested or bought and delivered to the wilderness.

The most impressive thing was the joints of the parts.

They were made using the classic carpentry method of tongue and groove without the use of metal nails in the loadbearing elements.

This ensured that the structure was absolutely silent.

The wood did not creek when the wind blew or the victim moved.

The outer surface of the wood was thoroughly impregnated with a dark, viscous mixture of tar and pine oil.

This solved two problems.

It masked the human odor and made the cage visually invisible among the dark bark and branches of the Douglas fur.

Even the system of blocks through which the criminal lifted the basket of water was lubricated with graphite grease.

Everything in this design was designed for one purpose, silence.

An internal inspection of the cell added gruesome details to the case.

The walls were covered with thousands of small scratches as if someone had tried to dig their way out with their fingernails.

But over time, these attempts gave way to passive waiting.

That same day, while the forensic team was disassembling the nest, Detective Blake met with Dr.

Emmelia Chen, a professor of musiccology at UC Berkeley.

The investigator brought with him a digital recording made by Dr.

Wei in the hospital room.

It showed Alyssa in a trance singing the same melody in a pure and mechanical way.

Blake hoped that identifying the song would help him understand the kidnapper’s logic.

Amelia Chen recognized the motif almost instantly, but her analysis added an unexpected, almost intimate touch to the investigation.

As she took off her headphones, she looked concerned.

In her testimony, she explained that this was not just a popular folk song.

It was a variation of the classic American lullabi, All the Pretty Little Horses, but in a very specific arrangement.

Such a slow tempo, special phrasing, and the way the vowels were stretched were typical of radio programs of the 50s, in particular, of evening broadcasts that children were put to bed to.

It was the music of another era.

With the new data, the engineering complexity of the cage and the old-fashioned lullabi, the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit radically changed the profile of the perpetrator.

Previously, they were looking for a satist who took pleasure in the victim’s suffering.

Now, the portrait looked different.

Profilers introduced the term distorted caregiver.

The new report stated, “The subject is a Caucasian male, aged between 35 and 45 years.

Physically very strong, able to lift heavy construction materials to a height on his own.

He has professional skills in carpentry or arborulture, caring for trees at height.

Socially isolated loner.

The psychologists emphasized a key point.

This man probably took care of a seriously ill relative for a long time, most likely his mother, who had specific needs or suffered from dementia.

He does not consider himself a criminal in the classical sense.

He is convinced that he is solving a problem.

His actions are a search for a replacement for the lost object of attachment or the creation of a tool to appease this object.

The key to unraveling the identity of the perpetrator lay in a phrase that Alyssa repeated to investigators.

She can’t sleep.

Detective Blake gave an urgent assignment to the analysts to check the archival records of elderly women’s deaths in Sysu County over the past two years.

The search criteria were specific.

Women who died at home were under the care of their sons and had a professional or amateur relationship to music.

The computer system produced dozens of results, but after a detailed check, the list was reduced to three names.

One of them caught the detective’s attention immediately, making his heart beat faster.

It was Darcy Benson, a former high school music teacher who died exactly one year ago from complications caused by Alzheimer’s disease.

The social services records contained disturbing notes.

She had been bedridden for the last years of her life, suffering from nighttime anxiety attacks and hallucinations.

But the most important detail was her son.

Jasper Benson was listed in the next of kin column.

A check of his data showed a strange picture.

The man did not show up at his mother’s funeral, which was organized by the municipality.

After her death, he categorically refused to communicate with social workers, did not open the door, and did not respond to letters.

His phone has been disconnected for over 10 months.

Jasper’s last known job was with a company that maintained high voltage lines in a wooded area where he was fired for his strange behavior.

The puzzle was complete.

The police had a name for the ghost.

On October 18th, 2015, the Syscu County Police Department made an official statement that changed the course of the investigation.

Jasper Benson, a 34year-old unemployed resident of the town of Weed, was declared a person of interest.

His photo was instantly broadcast on all local television stations and on the front pages of newspapers in Northern California.

It was an old, grainy photo from a driver’s license issued 5 years ago.

A man with a heavy look under his furrowed brow, thin lips, and wide cheekbones.

But the task force detectives knew there was no point in combing city neighborhoods or checking motel.

Benson was not a city dweller.

His home, his fortress, and his hunting grounds were the woods.

Detective Thomas Blake began to methodically dig up the suspect’s past, and each new fact found fit perfectly into the psychological profile previously compiled by FBI analysts.

Archived employment records showed that Jasper Benson had been working as a professional arborist, a tree care specialist for a large contracting company for 5 years.

His crew maintained hard-to-reach sections of power lines that ran through dense forests.

He was fired in 2013, not because of incompetence, but because of systematic violations of safety protocols.

Blake tracked down Benson’s former foreman.

The man, who agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity, told the investigator a detail that made the police take a fresh look at the cage design.

He was the best climber I’ve ever seen.

The witness said on the record he could climb a perfectly smooth pine trunk faster than a squirrel using only a rope and his own muscles.

He did not need a ladder.

He felt the tree as if he were part of it.

But he was strange.

He could sit at the top for hours during recess and just stare down, not wanting to come down to the people.

The next logical step in the investigation was an authorized search of the Benson family home.

It was located on the outskirts of the town of Weed, just a 15-minute drive from the foot of Mount Shasta.

The building had been empty since the death of Jasper’s mother, Darcy, who died exactly one year ago.

When the tactical team kicked in the front door, the officers were greeted by the heavy, stale smell of mold, dust, and stale air.

The house looked like a time capsule.

The interior resembled a bizarre museum dedicated to one person.

The living room was in perfect but eerie order.

An old piano stood in the center of the room, carefully covered with a thick layer of transparent polyethylene to protect the instrument from dust.

Dozens of Darcy Benson’s certificates and diplomas for musical achievements and teaching hung in straight frames on the walls.

Photos of the woman were everywhere, but none of them showed Jasper himself.

The most important evidence was found in the far room that once belonged to the son.

This room looked more like an engineering workshop than a residential bedroom.

On a wide workt were detailed diagrams of tying complex marine and climbing knots, as well as detailed drawings of lifting mechanisms and counterweights.

In the corner on the floor were cardboard boxes filled with old audio cassettes.

Detective Blake put on his gloves, picked up one of the tapes at random, and inserted it into a player he found there.

The room was filled with sound.

It was a private home recording.

At first, the clear, young, and strong voice of a woman singing classical lullabibis to the accompaniment of a piano came from the speaker.

These were 20 years old recordings.

Blake changed the cassette to one dated 2014.

The sound changed dramatically.

The woman’s voice was now old, trembling, and confused.

It was Darcy Benson in the last stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

She was confusing her words, stopping in the middle of a phrase and starting to cry out of powerlessness.

And then another voice sounded on the tape.

A man’s voice, low, calm, but with a hint of hidden threat.

It was Jasper.

“Sing, Mom,” he said through the hiss of the tape.

“Just sing like you used to and the fear will go away.

You need to sing to get water.

” This recording was direct evidence that the model of behavior that Jasper applied to Alyssa Carter was practiced on his own dying mother.

He forced her to sing to bring back the image of the woman he remembered and loved, ignoring the reality of her illness.

Inspection of the basement finally dispelled any doubts.

There, in the damp twilight, the police found the prototypes.

These were smaller models of cages skillfully woven from willow vines and thin branches.

He practiced for a long time, perfecting the design before building the final version for humans.

Also on the shelf were saved receipts from a hardware store in Reading.

They were dated August 2015.

The shopping list included hundreds of meters of professional climbing rope, blocks, carabiners, and a large pack of nails.

Exactly the same ones that had been used to board up Alyssa’s prison.

But the most disturbing discovery was a large topographic map of the Shasta Trinity Forest, pinned to the wall above the workbench.

On it, certain areas were circled with a red permanent marker.

One of the sectors corresponded to square E4 where Alyssa was found.

But there was another mark circled twice.

It pointed to a deep inaccessible gorge near the Mloud Falls in a place labeled on the map as Deadfall Meadow, the meadow of the Drywood.

It was an area of absolute wilderness surrounded by sheer cliffs.

Detective Blake realized that if Jasper Benson was hiding, he was not fleeing the country.

He was going to the place where he had prepared his next hideout.

The red circle on the map was not just a location marker.

It was an invitation to his territory.

On October 19th, 2015, the dawn over the Deadfall Meadow Tract, also known as the Dryland Glade, was gray and piercingly cold.

The thick fog descending from the peaks of Mount Shasta reduced visibility to zero, creating ideal conditions for the special operation.

This location, located in a deep stone bowl surrounded by centuries old redwoods and pines, was one of the most isolated points in the entire county.

It was here, according to map analysis, that Jasper Benson’s red marker led.

The Syskiu County Police SWAT team along with Detective Thomas Blake quietly took up positions around the perimeter, cutting off all possible escape routes.

At 6:00 15 minutes, a thermal imager operator gave a conditional signal to the team leader.

The sensitive optics detected a clear heat spot, not on the ground, but high in the crown of a giant ponderosa pine whose trunk was two times as wide as its arms.

At a height of about 50 ft, that’s over 15 m, a massive platform had been built, skillfully disguised by living branches and moss.

It was not just a temporary shelter.

It was a real nest that Benson had been preparing for months.

He was not hiding in the forest.

He had become an integral part of it.

An assault at this height was fraught with critical risk.

The police could not simply cut down the tree as the suspect could be armed or have hostages.

Although intelligence did not confirm this, two stormtroopers equipped with lightweight climbing gear and non-lethal weapons began a slow, silent ascent from the back of the trunk.

However, Jasper Benson’s instincts had been sharpened to an animal level during his years of voluntary reclusiveness.

When one of the officers was 30 ft up, the soft, barely audible sound of a metal carbine against the bark of a tree broke the silence.

The reaction from above was instantaneous.

Stones, heavy tools, and fragments of branches flew from the crown.

“Get back! I’m not coming down!” came a horse tearing cry that echoed off the walls of the gorge.

The next few minutes resembled a scene from an action movie.

Jasper was not going to give up.

He activated a pre-prepared escape route.

A system of steel cables, makeshift zip lines, was stretched 50 f feet between giant trees.

Police officers below watched in horror as a dirty bearded figure strapped a rollerblader to the cable, pushed off the platform, and flew toward a nearby tree at breakneck speed.

But the capture team had anticipated this scenario.

The snipers did not shoot to avoid killing, but one of the cables the fugitive tried to use could not withstand the dynamic load.

Either because of the materials wear and tear or a sudden jerk, the steel core snapped with a loud crack.

Jasper didn’t fall to the ground.

He was saved by the safety rope he was tied with.

He hung in the air between the trees, waving a long hunting knife and shouting incoherent threats.

After half an hour of tense negotiations that yielded no results, the commander authorized the use of a remote taser stun gun.

After receiving the discharge, Benson’s body went limp, the knife dropped from his hands, and he was slowly lowered to the ground using a system of blocks.

As he was laid face down in the damp grass and handcuffed, Detective Blake moved closer to look into the eyes of the man who had created hell for Alyssa Carter.

Jasper Benson did not look like a monster from a horror movie.

He was an extremely thin man, his skin like old parchment weathered by the winds.

His eyes were unfocused and his hands were trembling slightly, not from fear of the law, but from some kind of painful, feverish excitement.

On October 20th, Jasper Benson was in interrogation room 3 at the Syscu County Police Department.

He was handcuffed to a metal ring in the table and had been silent for 6 hours straight.

The suspect completely ignored the presence of his lawyer, did not respond to direct accusations, did not look at the photographs of the crime scene, and did not show any emotion when he was told about life in prison.

He simply stared at a single point on the wall, rhythmically tapping his fingers on the table surface.

Blake, watching through the mirror glass, realized that this rhythm matched the tempo of the lullabi.

The detective realized that standard methods of pressure or logical arguments would not work here.

He remembered the box of audio cassettes he had taken from Jasper’s mother’s house.

It was the only key to the criminal’s closed mind.

Blake walked into the interrogation room, not holding a single file in his hands.

He silently put an old cassette player on the table found during the search and pressed the play button.

The room was filled with sound.

The crackle of an old tape followed by the trembling weak voice of Darcy Benson singing All the Pretty Horses occasionally interrupted by soft crying.

The effect was instantaneous.

Jasper’s eyes widened, his pupils filling almost the entire iris.

The rhythmic tapping of his fingers stopped.

He leaned sharply toward the player, almost touching the speaker with his ear as if it were a living thing in need of protection.

“You found it,” he whispered.

His voice was dry and rustling like the friction of dry leaves.

“She’s singing again.

” She is singing, Jasper,” Blake replied quietly, sitting down across from him and looking directly into the suspect’s eyes.

“But Alyssa isn’t singing anymore.

You scared her into silence.

Why did you put her in that cage? Why did you force her to do that?” Over the next hour, the investigators witnessed a confession that made even the veterans of the search run cold.

Everything was recorded on camera.

Jasper did not talk about violence or the desire to inflict pain.

He talked about repairing and customizing in his distorted reality.

His mother’s death was a mistake, a failure in the system that could be fixed.

He was looking for a replacement.

Not a woman, not a lover, but a living voice.

“Mama was cold in the ground,” he explained in a casual tone as if he were talking about a broken fence.

I had to raise her high, closer to the sun.

Alyssa had the right tamber.

She just needed to practice more.

At the end of the interrogation, Detective Blake placed a confession form in front of him.

Jasper looked at the paper with an indifferent look.

He agreed to sign a full confession of guilt for kidnapping and torture, but he put forward one condition that would later go down in the history of forensic science as an example of absolute fixation.

I’ll sign it,” he said, not taking his eyes off the player.

“But you have to let me take this tape with me to my cell.

I need it to sing when I fall asleep.

” Blake nodded.

Jasper Benson took a pen and signed with a firm hand the document that would isolate him from society forever.

He was not afraid of prison.

He was only afraid of silence.

On March 12th, 2017, the Syskiu County District Court Building was surrounded by a tight ring of reporters and local residents.

This trial was the most high-profile event in the region’s recent history.

People had been lining up since 4:00 in the morning to get inside and see with their own eyes the man the press had dubbed the architect of the bird cages.

The public expected to see a monster, the physical embodiment of absolute evil, capable of suspending a living person 40 ft.

However, when the court administrator ordered everyone to stand up and the guards brought in the accused, a whisper of disappointment spread through the room.

In the dock was not a sadistic giant, but a stooped, pathetic man.

Jasper Benson was clean shaven, his long hair was cut short, and the cheap gray suit provided by the public defender hung on him like a hanger.

Throughout the hearing, he constantly fidgeted in his hard chair, rubbing his palms nervously and occasionally putting his hands over his ears when the noise in the room became too loud in his opinion.

He muttered silently to himself, not looking at the judge or the jury.

The defense strategy was predictable but risky.

Benson’s lawyer built a line of defense on his client’s complete insanity.

He called in forensic psychiatrists who claimed that Jasper was living in a fictional world where the lines between reality and his hallucinations were blurred.

The defense insisted that the defendant did not realize the cruelty of his actions.

He sincerely believed that he was saving his mother through the voice of another woman.

The culmination of the trial was the day of the victim’s testimony.

Alyssa Carter has not appeared in public since her rescue.

A year and a half of rehabilitation had passed.

When the doors opened and she entered the room, there was a dead silence.

She walked with a confident stride, looking straight ahead.

Although those in the front rows later said they saw her fingers turn white with tension as she gripped the wooden edge of the witness stand.

The prosecutor asked Alyssa to describe her relationship with her abductor.

The woman took a deep breath and turned her head toward the defendant.

“He didn’t want to kill me,” her voice was firm, although it still had that characteristic horseness that remained after a month of singing in the cold.

“Killing me would have been too simple and uninteresting for him.

He wanted to erase me.

He wanted Alyssa Carter to cease to exist and in her place to be a function.

I was to become a thing, a living tape recorder that would turn on and off solely at his will.

He made me sing when I was hungry, when I was chilled to the bone, when I thought I was going to die of thirst.

My suffering meant nothing to him.

All that mattered was the purity of the sound.

At that moment, something happened that forever changed the defense strategy.

Jasper Benson, who until that moment had looked completely detached and indifferent, suddenly looked up sharply.

For the first time in the entire trial, his eyes flashed with meaningful cold interest.

“He looked at Alyssa, not as a victim, but as a malfunctioning mechanism.

“You were faking,” he said loudly and clearly, interrupting the judge.

“In the third verse, you always hit the wrong note.

” The audience gasped.

This short phrase did more for the prosecution than hundreds of pages of psychiatric examinations.

It demonstrated a complete lack of empathy and cold, calculating cruelty.

These were not the words of a person who did not know what he was doing.

These were the words of a perfectionist narcissist for whom living people were just tools to be broken and customized at his discretion.

He remembered not her pain but her mistakes in the notes.

After this incident, the fate of the trial was sealed.

The jury took less than 4 hours to reach a verdict.

In judicial practice, such speed usually means only one thing.

The evidence is overwhelming.

The jury foreman announced the decision.

Guilty on all charges, including kidnapping, torture, and aggravated illegal detention.

The judge, reading the verdict, did not hide his attitude towards the defendant.

Jasper Benson was sentenced to two life sentences without the possibility of parole.

This guaranteed that he would never see the forest he loved so much again.

As the convoy led him out of the courtroom, Jasper did not scream, resist, or cry.

He returned to his state of indifference.

He looked through the people as if they did not exist.

The journalists who tried to ask him questions were met with a blank stare.

For him, the prison did not matter.

He had already lived all his life in the prison of his own mind, building walls of obsessions.

The story of the forester of Shasta ended quietly.

Jasper Benson died in the Corkran State Prison in California in 2021 from a massive heart attack.

During the inventory of the deceased’s belongings in his solitary confinement cell, the guards did not find any personal belongings, letters, or photographs.

There was nothing but piles of paper.

Hundreds of pencil drawings depicted the same thing.

The drawings were made with engineering precision, observing all the proportions and nodes.

They were bird cages, thousands of variations of cages that he continued to build in his imagination until his last breath.

He died in the concrete box, but his mind remained in the forest at the top of the old Douglas fur, waiting for the perfect sound that he could never achieve.