The neighborhood thought she was a QUIET NEIGHBOR, until police found THIS in her home… | HO!!

23 St.Paul Street.

An ordinary address in an ordinary suburb.

Blackstone is a typical New England town.

A population of about 9,000 people.

Quiet streets, tidy houses, manicured lawns, a place where everyone knows everyone else.

Or at least they think they do.

House number 23 didn’t stand out at all against the others.

A singlestory building with a small lot built in the middle of the last century.

Nothing remarkable.

There are hundreds of them in the area.

No, there was something that set this house apart from its neighbors.

It was as if it existed in a parallel reality.

While the neighbors painted fences, hosted backyard barbecues, and waved to each other in the mornings, this house remained a dark spot on the neighborhood map.

No one mowed the lawn.

The bushes grew so much they almost covered the first floor windows [music] and the windows themselves.

Neighbors couldn’t remember the last time they had seen them open.

The curtains were always drawn, day and night, summer and winter.

As if whoever lived inside didn’t want anything at all to be seen from the outside.

Officially, the house belonged to Raymond Rivera.

He worked in the IT sector.

None of the neighbors could say more specifically than that.

He left early in the morning and returned late at night.

Sometimes he was gone for several days.

Business trips, as he once mentioned to one of the neighbors.

Raymon gave the impression of an ordinary person.

Not very sociable, but not strange either, just busy.

The kind of person who lives his own life and doesn’t meddle in others.

In the suburbs, such people are valued.

No loud parties, no scandals, no problems.

An ideal neighbor if you don’t count the state of his yard.

Living in the house with Raymond was a woman, Erica Murray.

And about her, the neighbors could say almost nothing at all.

Erica didn’t work.

At any rate, no one saw her leaving for anywhere in the morning.

In fact, she rarely left the house.

Once a week, maybe less often.

She was seen at the car.

Sometimes she went to the store.

[music] Sometimes she just sat on the porch and smoked, staring at a single point.

The neighbor across the street, that same Jenny, once tried to talk to her.

She just said hello and asked how she was.

Erica answered in mono syllables and went into the house.

Jenny didn’t try again.

It wasn’t rudeness, rather an absence, as if Erica was physically there, but mentally somewhere very far away.

Neighbors chocked it up to introversion or depression.

Or simply that some people are just like that, withdrawn, reclusive.

After all, this is America.

Everyone has the right to live as they want.

But there was something else.

In all the years Raymond and Erica lived in that house, none of the neighbors had ever been inside.

Not for a cup of coffee, not even for a peak.

The door was always closed.

No holidays, no guests, no relatives for Thanksgiving.

And what seemed especially strange, no one saw trash being taken out of the house.

Think about it.

An ordinary family produces several bags of trash a week.

[music] Packaging, food scraps, plastic, paper.

All of this has to go somewhere.

The garbage truck came every Tuesday.

bins lined up along the street in a neat row.

But the bin for house number 23 remained empty.

Not always, of course.

[music] Sometimes there was something in it.

No, the amount of trash was suspiciously small for a house where two adults lived.

Neighbors noticed this, but didn’t give it much thought.

Maybe they sort their waste.

Maybe they take it to the dump themselves.

Maybe they just consume very little.

There could be any number of reasons.

People are inclined to find rational explanations for strange things.

[music] It’s a defense mechanism.

The brain doesn’t want to believe that right behind the wall, just a few meters from your bedroom, something truly horrific could be happening.

It’s easier to write it all off as eccentricity.

There was one more thing the neighbors remembered only later when they began giving testimony and piecing together details in their memories.

[music] The smell.

Not constant.

Not the kind that hits you in the nose immediately, but sometimes on hot summer days when the wind blew a certain way, something [music] unpleasant drifted from house 23, Swedish and putrid.

Neighbors thought maybe a plumbing issue or a cat brought a dead rat or just some trash lying around in the yard.

It didn’t occur to anyone to investigate it seriously.

And then there was that August evening in 2014.

The crying that didn’t stop for hours.

Jenny calling the police.

A patrol car turning onto St.

Paul Street.

[music] The officers parked at the house.

They got out.

A standard procedure, a welfare check.

They had done this hundreds of times.

Knock on the door, make sure everything is okay.

Fill out a report.

Now, when they reached the porch, the smell hit their faces with such force that one of the officers instinctively recoiled.

It wasn’t the smell of plumbing.

It wasn’t the smell of trash.

It was a smell that any police officer recognizes instantly and will never forget.

The officer reached for his radio.

The door didn’t open right away.

The officers knocked persistently for several minutes before they heard footsteps inside.

Slow, heavy, shuffling.

Then the lock clicked.

A woman stood on the threshold, thin, pale, with dark circles under her eyes.

Her hair was gathered in a messy ponytail.

Her clothes were wrinkled as if she had slept in them for several days in a row.

It was Erica Murray.

She looked at the officers without surprise, without fear, without any emotion at all.

She just looked and waited.

The officer explained the reason for the visit.

A call had come in.

Neighbors heard crying, a standard check.

Could they come in and make sure everything was all right? Erica nodded and stepped aside.

What was revealed behind the door made the officer stop in his tracks.

He had worked in the police force for over 10 years.

He had seen everything.

Drunken brawls, [music] the consequences of addiction, domestic abuse, but he hadn’t been prepared for this.

Neither in the academy nor on the streets of Blackstone.

The hallway as such didn’t exist.

Instead, there was a narrow passage between two walls of trash.

Literally walls.

Bags of waste, boxes, packages, some rags.

All of this was piled from the floor almost to the ceiling.

In some places, the height of the debris reached a meter and a half.

It was only possible to pass sideways, squeezing between these barricades.

[music] And the smell, the same smell the officer had felt on the porch, was 10 times stronger here.

Ammonia, rot, biological waste.

All of this blended into one unbearable wave that made the eyes water and the stomach churn.

The officer covered his nose with his sleeve and moved forward.

The living room looked no better.

The sofa was piled with clothes and some rags.

On the floor was a layer of dirt several centimeters thick.

Used hygiene products lay everywhere.

Hundreds, maybe thousands.

No one threw them away.

They were just tossed onto the floor where they accumulated for months and perhaps years.

Insects crawled on the walls.

Not isolated individuals, entire colonies.

They were everywhere.

on the furniture, on the trash, on the remains of food scattered around the room.

Mouse holes were visible in the corners.

The officer had seen drug dens.

He had seen the homes of people who hadn’t cleaned up after themselves for years.

But this was something else.

This wasn’t just a mess or simple neglect.

This was a house that had turned into a landfill.

A place where people cannot should not live.

And yet, someone lived here.

Erica walked ahead.

navigating between the piles with practiced agility.

To her, all of this was the norm.

She didn’t apologize, didn’t try to explain.

She just led the officer through this labyrinth as if she were showing an ordinary apartment.

The crying was coming from upstairs, from the place where the second floor should be.

The stairs were partially blocked by debris, but it was possible to climb them.

The officer began the ascent, trying not to touch the walls.

Something crunched under his feet on the steps.

He preferred not to look at what it was.

There were two rooms upstairs.

The door to the first was slightly a jar.

The officer peered inside and for a second he forgot how to breathe.

On a mattress thrown directly onto the floor in the middle of the trash sat two.

One of them had barely learned to walk.

The second was tiny, having come into the world only a few months ago.

Both were covered in filth.

Not just dirty covered.

A layer of dried biological traces on the skin, tangled hair in which parasites scured.

The clothes, if they could be called clothes, had turned into rags soaked in filth.

The older one looked at the officer with huge eyes, without fear, without curiosity, with a kind of animal weariness, like a creature that had never seen other people, who doesn’t know what a street is or sunlight or a playground.

The younger one lay on the mattress and cried.

That same thin, agonizing cry the neighbor had heard.

A cry that didn’t stop for hours because there was no one to answer it.

The officer turned to Erica.

She stood in the doorway and looked at all of this with the same empty expression on her face as if she didn’t understand what was wrong.

He asked, “Were these the ones in her care?” Erica nodded.

He asked if there was anyone else in the house.

Erica paused for a second, then nodded again.

There are two more older.

The officer walked further.

There were two more children in the same chaos of trash and filth, the same tangled hair, the same dirt, the same lost look.

Four.

Four small human beings had been living in this house all this time.

And judging by their condition, no one had looked after them for months or maybe years.

The officer went out onto the porch and called for backup, an ambulance, protective services, everyone he could.

While he waited, Erica followed him out.

She lit a cigarette and began to look at the street with the same indifference with which she looked at those she was supposed to protect.

She didn’t try to run.

She didn’t try to explain herself.

She just stood and smoked as if what was happening didn’t concern her.

The first cars began to pull up to the house on St.

Paul Street.

But the main discovery was still to come because the four found alive turned out not to be the only [music] inhabitants of this house.

Cars were arriving at the house on St.

Paul Street.

patrol cars, ambulances, protective services.

The quiet street of Blackstone had turned into a scene of an emergency.

Neighbors came out onto their porches, trying to understand what was happening behind that overgrown fence they had walked past for years.

The first medics entered the house and came out a minute later.

One of them became ill right by the porch.

The second leaned against the wall and tried to catch his breath.

They had worked in the ambulance service for more than a year.

They had seen accidents, fires, overdoses.

No, they hadn’t been prepared for this.

They had to call for additional equipment, respirators, protective suits.

The level of biological hazard inside was such that entering without protection was simply unsafe.

While the medics prepared for their second entry, the officer continued to interview Erica.

She answered in short phrases without emotion, without attempts to justify herself, as if she were answering questions about the weather.

How many people live in the house? Six, including her and Raymond.

The four who were under her care, the two youngest and the two oldest.

Where is Raymond? At work.

When will he return? She doesn’t know.

The officer clarified about the older ones.

Erica nodded.

Yes, there are two more older.

They are also somewhere in the house.

Somewhere in the house.

She said it as if she were talking about lost keys, not living people.

A search group headed inside.

Finding someone in this chaos was not easy.

The rooms had turned into labyrinths of trash.

Some doors were blocked by piles and wouldn’t open fully.

They had to squeeze through gaps, climb over barricades of bags and boxes.

The older ones were found in the basement.

They were sitting there in the dark amidst the same trash and dirt.

Both emaciated, both covered in the same crust of dirt as the younger ones.

No, in their eyes was something else.

Not void, but fear.

They were old enough to understand.

[music] Something serious was happening and frightened enough not to know if it was good or bad.

When they were being led out of the house, the older one covered his eyes with his hand.

He couldn’t look at the sunlight.

Later, it turned out that he hadn’t been outside for several years.

His eyes had simply grown unaccustomed to daylight.

All four were loaded into ambulances.

The medics worked carefully, trying not to frighten them even more.

For these small people, everything happening was their first contact with the outside world in a long time, perhaps in their entire lives.

The condition of each was critical.

Emaciation, dehydration, skin infections, parasites, developmental delay.

The younger ones didn’t know how to speak, although they should have long ago.

The older ones couldn’t read or write.

None of them had ever been to school.

No one had been to a doctor officially.

The younger ones didn’t exist.

No birth certificates, no medical records, no entries in any registries.

Four ghosts living in a house in the middle of an ordinary American suburb.

DCF Protective Services took control of the case.

All four were placed in emergency housing, first in a hospital, then with foster families.

>> [music] >> They faced months of rehabilitation and years of therapy, if they could ever recover at all from what they had been through.

Erica was detained on the spot, only for questioning, for now, there were no formal charges yet.

She didn’t resist.

She didn’t demand a lawyer.

She just sat in the patrol car with the same vacant expression on her face.

Raymond Rivera returned [music] home that same evening.

He saw the police cordons, the yellow tape around his house, [music] the crowd of onlookers on the street.

He was also detained for questioning.

[music] During the first interrogation, he appeared shocked.

He claimed he didn’t know the extent of the problem.

Yes, the house was dirty.

[music] Yes, he understood that Erica wasn’t coping.

No, he worked 12 hours a day.

He [music] supported the family.

He couldn’t control everything.

The investigators listened to his explanations and made notes.

The story didn’t add up.

A man lives in a house piled with trash to the ceiling where four small people sit in their own filth and he notices nothing.

Either he is lying or his level of denial of reality is not inferior to Erica’s.

The house on St.

Paul Street was sealed.

Yellow tape, locks on the doors, security around the perimeter.

What had begun as a check following a neighbor’s call had turned into a full-scale criminal investigation.

The charges were obvious abuse and neglect.

But the investigators understood that this was only the tip of the iceberg.

The house needed to be searched thoroughly.

Every room, every closet, every pile of trash.

This required time and resources.

Forensic experts would have to work in biohazard suits, dismantling layer by layer what had accumulated over the years.

They didn’t yet know what they would find under those piles.

They still believed the worst was behind them.

Four rescued, the perpetrators detained, the case solved.

But the real nightmare was waiting for them ahead.

Because this house held more than just mountains of trash.

By the morning of August 29th, 2014, after investigators had worked through the entire night, the overall picture began to clear up slightly, at least in general terms.

Interrogations, protocols, the initial inspection of the scene, all of this yielded the first results.

Now, the investigation needed to understand the most important thing.

Who exactly was to blame for what had been happening within the walls of this house for so many years? At first glance, the answer to this question seemed completely obvious.

Erica Murray.

She was in the house constantly, virtually without leaving.

She didn’t work.

She was the only adult who spent all her time with the four found.

By all logic, she was the one who bore direct personal responsibility for them.

But there was also Raymond Rivera, the official owner of this house.

the father, at least biologically of all four, a man who, by law and conscience, should have provided for his family and closely monitored what exactly was happening under his own roof.

He was interrogated in a separate room, and what he told during the interrogation left the experienced investigators in a total dead end.

Raymond asserted with total seriousness that for the last several years, he had lived exclusively in the basement, literally in the basement of his own home.

His bed was there.

All his personal belongings were kept there.

And that was where he spent the negligible amount of time he had left between hard work and sleep.

In his own words, he practically never went upstairs into the living rooms.

He didn’t enter the rooms where those he was supposed to protect lived.

He supposedly had absolutely no idea what a catastrophic state the house was in.

Erica repeatedly told him that everything was under control and she was managing and he believed her or he just very conveniently pretended to believe.

But the most startling part of his testimony was yet to come.

Raymond officially stated for the record that he didn’t even suspect the existence of the two youngest, the one who had barely learned to walk and the one who had come into the world just a few months ago.

He persistently claimed he had no idea that Erica was pregnant twice and that she twice gave birth to a new life right in that filthy house.

Without doctors, without hospital visits, and without any outside help, the investigators looked at each other in disbelief.

[music] The story sounded beyond absurd.

How can you live under the same roof with a woman and not notice two of her pregnancies? How could you not hear the crying of newborns behind a thin wall? How could you walk past the doors of rooms for years and yet not know exactly who was in them and how many people were there? Raymond nevertheless stood firm.

He worked many hours at a time.

He came home very late, left for work too early.

A separate entrance from the street led to the basement where he lived.

[music] Thanks to this, he could enter and leave the house without passing through the main residential part of the building at all.

Erica categorically would not let him upstairs, constantly saying that it was a mess and she would definitely deal with everything herself, and he simply didn’t insist otherwise.

This was either the pure truth and then a man with some extreme pathological level of reality avoidance sat before the investigators [music] or it was a cynical lie.

And then Raymond was a full accomplice in all the nightmare that happened in that house.

Verifying his words at that moment was extremely difficult.

Neighbors unanimously confirmed that they saw the man rarely, that he indeed spent a lot of time at work, that Erica was the only one who remained in the house constantly and without fail.

No, in itself, this proved nothing, neither in favor of his version nor against it.

Then the investigators focused entirely on Erica.

Her story was fundamentally different.

She didn’t try to deny obvious things.

[music] Yes, she lived in this house all this time.

Yes, she was constantly near the four found.

Yes, she knew perfectly well what an appalling state they were in.

She just sincerely didn’t see a big problem in all of this.

During interrogations, Erica spoke with chilling calmness, almost detachment, as if she were telling a story about someone else entirely.

She listlessly explained that she simply had no energy to clean up, that the trash in the rooms accumulated gradually, and at a certain point there was simply too much of it, that she intended to tidy the house many times, but kept putting it off for later, and the four in the rooms upstairs.

According to her, she fed them.

Sometimes when she remembered to do it in time, she changed their diapers when she was in the right mood.

Did she ever take them outside? Never.

[music] Why take them out? In her opinion, it was too dangerous.

There were strangers.

There were unnecessary questions she categorically didn’t want to answer.

Psychologists who worked with Erica later used the term dissociation in their reports.

This is a complex defense mechanism of the human psyche, where a person sort of completely disconnects from a reality they cannot bear to accept.

[music] Erica carefully built a wall around herself.

First an invisible psychological one and then a literal one consisting of mountains of trash and total isolation from society.

And inside this wall, she created her own distorted world where everything was perfectly normal.

Where mountains of dirt were just a small mess, where hungry, abandoned, and exhausted little people were just her quiet housemates she didn’t need to worry about unnecessarily.

But for the letter of the law, any psychological explanations were of no decisive importance.

Only proven facts mattered and the facts said the following.

Four living beings spent years in conditions directly threatening their health and life itself.

And the only adult capable person who was near them constantly was Erica Murray.

She was officially arrested the very next day after the discovery.

The list of charges was substantial, endangering the life and health of those in her care.

Abuse, criminal neglect of duties.

These were very serious charges that could mean long years of imprisonment.

Raymond Rivera was also temporarily detained, but was soon released on his own recgnizance.

His true role in this story was still to be determined through investigation.

The investigation did not rule out that he was a full accomplice.

No, at that time there was insufficient evidence for his arrest and detention.

Erica was taken to the county jail.

Her bail was set at $100,000, an amount she could never have paid.

She remained behind bars awaiting the start of the court process.

And at that very same time, forensic experts continued their heavy and grueling work in the house on St.

Paul Street.

Layer by layer, they dismantled the ages old piles of junk.

They carefully documented every find.

They searched for any clues that would help them reconstruct the full authentic picture of what exactly had been happening here for long years.

They didn’t even suspect that the main most terrifying piece of evidence had been lying all this time in an ordinary wall closet of the second floor bedroom, right under a heap of old rags and trash.

and that it was this discovery that would in an instant turn a neglect case into an investigation of something far more macob, dark, and irreparable.

While the forensic experts worked in the house, social workers dealt with those who were saved.

Four were in the hospital under roundthe-clock supervision.

The younger ones were in the intensive care unit.

The older ones were in regular wards, but with the constant presence of psychologists.

The condition of all four was serious but stable.

Doctors said that a few more weeks in those conditions and the consequences could have become irreversible.

Emaciation had reached a critical point.

The immune system [music] was undermined.

Development was stunted for years, but physical injuries were only half the problem.

The psychological wounds turned out to be deeper.

Social workers began to talk carefully with the older children.

They were old enough to remember and understand, old enough to tell.

The conversations were held in a special setting.

Soft lighting, comfortable chairs, toys on the table.

Psychologists used techniques developed for working with traumatized witnesses.

No pressure, no leading questions, just patient waiting until the person was ready to speak.

The older boy spoke first.

He told his story slowly with pauses, often stopping in the middle of a sentence.

His voice was monotonic.

That’s how people speak when they have learned to shut off emotions to survive.

Life in the house on St.

Paul Street was the only life he knew.

He didn’t go to school.

He didn’t play with others on the street.

He didn’t know what a birthday or a holiday was.

His world was limited by the walls of the house and the mountains of trash between them.

Food appeared irregularly.

Sometimes Erica brought something from the store.

Sometimes they ate what they found in the refrigerator, even if it was spoiled.

Sometimes they didn’t eat at all for several days.

There was nowhere to wash.

The bathroom had long since ceased to function.

It too was piled with trash.

The toilet worked only occasionally.

Most often, everyone relieved themselves right in the rooms, in corners, or in bags that were then simply tossed on the floor.

The older boy described all this without horror.

For him, it was normal.

He didn’t know that people live differently, that somewhere there were clean houses, hot water, three meals a day.

His only reality was that nightmare from which he had just been pulled.

Then he spoke about the younger ones.

He remembered how one of them appeared.

Erica was pregnant.

He saw it although he didn’t understand what was happening.

Then one night he heard screams.

And in the morning someone new appeared in the house.

Small red screaming.

Erica didn’t take them anywhere.

She didn’t call doctors.

She managed by herself right in the bedroom amidst the trash and dirt.

Then she just put the newborn in a corner of the room and went back to her business.

The same thing happened with the youngest.

The same pregnancy that no one monitored.

The same process in unsanitary conditions.

The same result, another small person thrown into the chaos.

The social workers listened and took notes.

The story was monstrous, but so far it fit within the framework of what they already knew.

Neglect, isolation, lack of sanitation.

terrible, but unfortunately not unique.

And then the older boy said something else.

He mentioned that there should have been more younger ones, not four more.

He remembered another one, maybe two.

They appeared just like the others after Erica’s screams at night.

But then they disappeared.

The social worker asked him to clarify.

What did he mean disappeared? Where did they go? The boy went silent.

He stared at the wall for a long time.

Then he said he didn’t know for sure.

Just one day the crying would stop.

And Erica would say that the one who had been crying was no more, that it was better for everyone, that he shouldn’t think about it.

He asked where they went.

Erica didn’t answer or she answered evasively.

She said they had fallen asleep, that they had left, that they were gone.

Period.

The boy accepted this explanation.

He had no choice.

In his world, adults didn’t lie because he only knew one adult, and that adult was Erica.

The social worker put down the notepad.

Her hands were shaking slightly.

What had started as a neglect case had just turned into something entirely different.

If the boy’s words were true, and he had no reason to lie, there could be more than just the living in the house on St.

Paul Street.

The information went immediately to the investigators.

New instructions were passed to the forensic experts working on site.

Now they were not just looking for evidence of neglect.

They were looking for what remained of those who were no more.

The house, which already seemed like a place from a nightmare, could hold secrets even more terrifying.

And the answer lay somewhere under the layers of trash accumulated over years of isolation and madness.

Interrogations of Erica Murray began the day after her arrest, August 30th, 2014.

The interrogation room at the Blackstone Police Department was standard and unremarkable.

A simple table, two chairs, and a massive mirror on the wall.

Behind this mirror sat observers, recording every movement of the suspect.

Erica was led into the room in handcuffs.

She sat slowly on the chair and stared blankly at the wall.

The detective introduced himself, explained all the formal procedures, and turned on the recording, after which he began to ask the first questions.

What happened in the following hours puzzled even the most experienced officers in the department, Erica answered.

But the nature of her answers was extremely specific.

It wasn’t even the content of her words, but the delivery.

She spoke in an absolutely flat, colorlessly monotonic voice.

She didn’t pause to think, showed no visible emotion, and had no reaction to the monstrous weight of the charges.

The detective asked about the state of the dwelling.

Erica agreed without a hint of embarrassment that the house was dirty.

Yes, the trash had accumulated for a long time.

Yes, she really hadn’t cleaned for a long time.

No, at the same time, the woman stubbornly insisted that she didn’t see it as a big problem.

She just didn’t have time.

She just lacked the strength.

She claimed she sincerely intended to clean up, but it all just somehow kept being put off for later.

The investigator moved to the question of the four found.

Erica calmly confirmed their existence.

[music] Yes, they lived in this house.

Yes, she looked after them as best she could.

No, she didn’t think at all that their lives were in danger.

They had food.

They had a roof over their heads.

And in her opinion, that was quite enough.

However, when the law enforcement representative began to clarify details exactly how many people lived in the house and in what sequence they were born, Erica began to get noticeably confused.

First, she spoke of four.

After a while, she accidentally mentioned five.

Then, as if catching herself, she returned to four.

To questions about when each appeared, she gave completely different figures and to questions about dates.

Only evasive and vague answers.

The investigator continued to press, demanding specifics.

[music] How many times had she actually been pregnant? When exactly had she given birth to each one? Who had helped her in the process? Erica insisted she had managed alone.

Every time right there in the house, without doctors or any outside help, she insisted that Raymond didn’t know about what was happening, at least about the last two.

In her version, she hid her pregnancy from him.

She wore exclusively loose clothes and told her partner she had just gained a little weight.

The detective asked directly why was it necessary to hide it.

Erica only gave a detached shrug.

She stated she didn’t want to create extra problems that Raymond was already working too much and she didn’t want to further burden him.

Such an explanation defied any logic.

Hiding a pregnancy from a person with whom you share a roof.

Hiding the appearance of new life in a house where this person nominally also resides.

Either Raymond Rivera really lived in some parallel reality in his basement, or both were elaborately lying, each pursuing their own goal.

But the investigators at that moment were [music] most interested in something else.

The older son’s words about those who had vanished without a trace.

When this question [music] finally came, Erica fell silent for the first time in the entire interrogation.

For a few seconds, she just stared at the wall and then quietly said that she [music] didn’t understand the essence of the question at all.

The investigator repeated as clearly as possible.

Was there anything else besides those four whom the police found alive? Erica cut him off.

No, [music] only four.

There had never been anyone else.

Then the detective reminded her of the older son’s testimony, [music] that the boy remembered others, that the crying would sometimes suddenly stop.

[music] And his mother would tell him that the one who had been crying was no more.

Erica just shook her head.

She stated that her son was confusing everything, that he had too vivid an imagination, and that there had only ever been four in the house.

But her eyes, for the first time in long hours, flickered.

It was a barely perceptible movement, lasting a fraction of a second, but the experienced investigator caught it.

He continued the attack.

He asked again and again, constantly changing the phrasing and approaching the topic from different angles.

Erica held out.

She denied everything, repeating that she had nothing else to tell.

After 3 hours of exhausting interrogation, the investigator took a break and went into the hallway to his colleagues.

They discussed the suspect’s behavior, which was extremely untypical.

She wasn’t aggressive, didn’t fall into hysterics, and didn’t look desperate, which is usually the reaction of people accused of such grave deeds.

She seemed empty, as if everything being discussed concerned someone else.

The psychologist observing the process confirmed the suspicions.

Erica was in a dissociative state.

This is a powerful defense mechanism that the psyche switches on when the surrounding reality becomes absolutely unbearable.

The person sort of disconnects from their own emotions and the consequences of their actions.

In such a state, one can commit monstrous things and feel absolutely nothing because in that person’s mind, the events simply aren’t happening.

Erica Murray spent years in a house turned into a rotting landfill.

Years alongside living beings she didn’t care for.

Years in total isolation.

Her psyche had built an impenetrable wall behind which everything was normal.

The dirt was just a mess.

The abandoned little people were just quiet housemates.

And those who disappeared, they simply ceased to exist as if they had never been in this reality at all.

The investigators clearly understood.

Getting truthful confessions from her using classical methods would be incredibly difficult.

She wasn’t lying in the usual sense of the word.

She lived in her own version of reality where her actions were not a crime.

No, a subjective version of reality is one [music] thing, and irrefutable facts are quite another.

And these facts needed to be sought not in the interrogation room.

They lay there on St.

Paul Street under years of layers of trash in dark closets and corners in the places where forensic experts were only just beginning to reach.

While the investigators talked with Erica, the team at the site continued to methodically, bag by bag, clear the piles.

And what they discovered in the bedroom on the second floor not only confirmed the darkest fears, but also instantly transformed the neglect case into something entirely different.

The forensic experts work in the house on St.

Paul Street dragged on for several agonizing days.

It wasn’t a standard investigative search.

What was happening more closely resembled a grim archaeological expedition into the very center of a man-made hell.

Layer by layer, bag by bag, room by room, the specialists pushed through the deposits of human madness.

The team of experts worked exclusively in full protective gear.

Snow White suits, respirators, gloves in several layers.

This wasn’t a whim, but a harsh necessity.

The level of biological contamination inside the premises had reached such a mark that being there without isolation was mortally dangerous to one’s health.

Concentrated ammonia fumes from decaying waste bit into the mucous membranes of the eyes, even through dense protective goggles.

Some employees were forced to leave the building every 30 minutes just to take a breath of fresh air and come to their senses.

They methodically documented every found object, every stratum of years of trash, and every square meter of floor.

Photo documentation, video recordings, multi-page protocols.

Lawyers would have to study these materials for long months.

And any, even the most unremarkable detail could ultimately become key to justice.

The first floor was cleared in 2 days.

Nothing was found there except piles of junk and clear evidence of long years of neglect.

The inspection of the basement took another day.

There indeed was some semblance of a living space.

Raymond’s [music] bed, his personal belongings, and a relative order against the backdrop of the total chaos of the rest of the house.

It seemed he had truly physically distanced himself from the nightmare unfolding directly above his head.

On the third day, the search group finally reached the second floor into the holy of holies of this place, Erica Murray’s bedroom.

This room was the true epicenter of events.

Here, Erica spent most of her time.

Here, she slept on a mattress thrown directly onto the dirty floor among trash heaps.

Here also, judging by the older son’s testimony, she gave birth to new lives.

And here also, as it turned out later, these lives often flickered out.

The specialists proceeded with extreme caution.

They cleared the piles and sorted the finds, moving from the doorway to the opposite wall.

A wardrobe in the corner of the room was almost completely hidden under a heap of rags and heavy bags.

Just to get to its doors took several hours of grueling physical labor.

August 31st.

Around 3:00 in the afternoon, one of the experts opened the wardrobe door and froze, unable to move.

On a shelf among old junk, stood an ordinary cardboard box, a very simple one from some household appliance tightly taped shut.

It looked completely mundane if not for the fact that a smell emanated from it.

An entirely different [music] smell, not that suffocating spirit of a landfill that had permeated the whole building.

This was something much heavier and more concentrated.

The employee immediately called over his colleagues.

The find was photographed from all angles.

Its exact position was recorded, [music] and only after that was it carefully taken off the shelf.

The weight of the object was small, no more than a couple of kilog.

[music] The sticky tape was cut with surgical precision, preserving it for future examination.

When the lid was finally opened, what had once been a living being was found inside, small, skeletonized, wrapped in scraps of cloth that had almost turned to dust over time.

By preliminary forensic assessment, this was what remained of a newborn or one who had been about to be born.

Exactly how much time had been spent in this improvised tomb was impossible to determine by eye.

months or years.

The answer to this question could only be given by laboratory examination.

The specialist who first looked inside hastily left the room.

His body could not withstand what he saw, and he vomited right on the stairs.

This man had spent 15 years in forensics and had seen many tragedies, but it is impossible to prepare for such a sight.

The group leader urgently contacted the investigative department and reported the grim find, requesting the arrival of a medical examiner.

Simultaneously, he gave the order to continue the search with tripled vigor.

Intuition suggested that if one such box was hidden in the closet, there might be others, and the fears were confirmed.

A second box was discovered an hour later in the same closet on the bottom shelf, pushed deep into a dark corner.

It was slightly smaller than the first.

also tightly wrapped in tape and emanating the same characteristic scent of decay.

Inside was hidden another piece of evidence of the tragedy just as tiny, fragile, and wrapped in decayed cloth.

Two in ordinary appliance boxes in a bedroom closet literally a few steps from the mattress on which Erica Murray calmly fell asleep every night.

Very close to the room where four children found alive had been trying to survive all this time.

All the time the older son was growing up within these walls while others appeared and vanished without a trace.

While Erica continued her habitual life and Raymon supposedly remained in complete ignorance in his basement.

These boxes just stood on the shelves quiet and forgotten.

As if there was old junk inside that they were simply too lazy to throw away.

The medical examiner arrived by evening.

A cursory examination on the spot confirmed.

In both cases, we are talking about newborns.

More precise details could not be established immediately due to strong changes in the tissues.

Detailed work in laboratory conditions [music] was required for final conclusions.

The fragile finds were packed into special containers and sent to the morg.

In the house, the search continued.

Now, the experts examined every cime with doubled attention.

The investigators immediately reported to the prosecutor’s office.

The case, which began as a flagrant case of neglect, instantly moved into the category of particularly grave crimes.

A new, much more severe interrogation awaited Erica Murray and completely different points of accusation.

But first, law enforcement needed the results of examinations.

They needed to establish the identities of those found and understand when and under what circumstances they ended up in those boxes.

And the forensic experts continued their mournful work.

The house on St.

Paul Street had not yet exhausted its supply of grim secrets.

A third find was already on the way, although at that moment, no one yet suspected it.

On September 1st, 2014, the biological materials were delivered to the office of the chief medical examiner for the state of Massachusetts in Boston.

Two containers with the contents that forensic experts had extracted from the closet in Erica Murray’s bedroom.

Now, literally everything depended on the findings of the specialists of this department, whether they could provide the investigation with the evidence necessary to bring the most serious possible charges.

The laboratory in Boston had the most modern equipment and staff with colossal experience.

But even here, they understood the Blackstone case was special.

Not in a technical sense, but in a human one.

What was in those containers was once supposed to become people and possibly already were, even if for a very short time.

The main dilemma for the experts sounded simple.

What exactly happened to those found in the boxes? Were they alive at the moment of birth? Or if they never take their first breath, and Erica simply couldn’t bring herself to part with them humanely? There was a third option which the investigators were afraid to think about, but were obliged to consider.

They were born alive, but someone made it so that they suddenly stopped breathing.

The qualification of the case directly depended on the answer to this question.

The difference between concealing remains and intentional termination of life is a chasm between several years of imprisonment and a life sentence.

It is the difference between whether Erica Murray would ever be released or spend the rest of her days behind bars.

The staff of the medical examiner’s office set to work, aware of the weight of responsibility.

any of their conclusions would be studied under a microscope.

First by detectives, then by prosecutors, defense lawyers, and finally the court.

An error in either direction was unacceptable.

The first thing they managed to establish was the extreme degree of change.

In both cases, the fines were almost completely skeletonized.

Soft tissues were absent.

Only bones, fragments of cartilage, and some dried elements of what was once flesh remained.

This irrefutably proved that significant time had passed since they were placed in the boxes, at least many months and more likely years.

Exact dating was impossible to establish.

Specific storage conditions in a closed closet in the heat surrounded by rotting waste accelerated the processes of decomposition in an unpredictable way.

[music] In a natural environment, skeletonization takes from several months to several years.

But the Murray House did not yield to standards.

There a unique ecosystem of insects, microorganisms, and fungi had formed which could both catastrophically accelerate or slow down the destruction of tissues.

Experts could only approximately outline the range from 2 to 8 years.

But for a trial, such vague figures meant very little.

The second important point was the stage of development at the time of the tragedy.

Here, the conclusions were more definite.

The size of the bones and the degree of development of the cranial sutures unequivocally pointed to newborns fullterm fully formed and ready for life outside the maternal organism.

The length of the femurss corresponded to a full term of gestation.

This meant that Erica had carried them to the end.

They were ready to appear and they appeared.

But did they appear alive? That was the key question to which science could not give an answer.

To state [music] whether someone took even one breath, it is necessary to examine the lung tissue.

This is a classic hydrostatic test.

If the lungs float in water, it means there was air in them.

At least one breath was taken.

But in this case, the lung tissue simply hadn’t been preserved.

Nor had the heart, brain, or any other organs.

Specialists applied all available methods.

hisytological analysis of tissue remains, study of bones for fractures or cracks, toxicological tests.

The results were a stalemate.

No traces of damage on the bones, no signs of physical force or toxic substances, but and this is most important, no evidence of the opposite was found either.

No evidence of a first breath or a heartbeat.

Experts could only state it is impossible to establish the exact cause of what happened for objective reasons.

While the laboratory worked on the first two finds, on September 3rd, forensic experts discovered in the house on St.

Paul Street another third box.

It was pushed into the very corner of the bedroom and carefully covered with rags.

If the experts hadn’t known exactly what they were looking for, they might well have passed it by.

The third find was delivered to Boston on September 4th.

Specialists set to work already with a bitter sense of hopelessness.

The condition was identical.

Skeletonization, absence of organs, and the impossibility of establishing the cause.

But a detail was found that united all three cases.

In each find, fragments of the placenta and umbilical cord were preserved.

The umbilical cord in all cases was not professionally cut, but crudely torn or clamped with something blunt.

This meant that Erica had managed in absolute solitude in a filthy bedroom without the slightest medical assistance.

By midepptember, the medical examiner’s office compiled a final conclusion of 23 pages.

The verdict read, “Cause not established.

No signs of impact found, but no signs of whether they breathed or did not breathe were recorded either.” For the prosecution, this became a critical problem.

Without evidence that those found in the boxes had breathed even once, the charge of intentional termination of life fell apart.

Any lawyer would break such a position in court in minutes.

All that remained was concealment of remains a serious crime, but completely incomparable to the nightmare the detective suspected.

The investigation reached a dead end.

Everyone understood that something monstrous had happened.

Seven pregnancies, four survivors in the dirt, and three in boxes.

No internal conviction is not proof.

It was necessary to look for other leads witnesses or archives to shed light on the true story of this house.

Investigators clearly understood.

If the main charge against Erica cannot be proven, perhaps it’s worth taking a closer look at the other person, at the one who lived under the very same roof for long years, at the one who was formerly the head of this nightmarish household, at Raymond Rivera.

Since his initial detention on August 28th, Raymond had been free on his own recgnizance.

[music] He was released because there was no direct evidence against him at that time.

He stubbornly maintained that he knew nothing and the investigation could not prove otherwise.

But now, after the discovery in the cardboard boxes, the situation had radically changed.

Detectives decided to dig much deeper.

A second interrogation of Rivera took place on September 15th, 2014.

This time the atmosphere in the room was completely different.

It was no longer a formal conversation with a possible witness, but a tough talk with a potential accomplice.

Investigators began with dry facts.

Raymond Rivera, owner of the house on St.

Paul Street, partner of Erica Murray for more than 10 years, biological father of all seven.

The four found alive and the three discovered in the closet.

At least the results of DNA tests confirmed this with 100% accuracy.

Raymon did not deny paternity.

He admitted he had been in a relationship with Erica for many years.

He admitted he knew of the existence of the older children, but he continued to insist on what he had said from the very beginning.

He did not know about the two younger girls and certainly did not suspect those three who lay in boxes.

Investigators pressed from all sides.

How could you live for years in the same house with a woman and not notice five of her pregnancies? How could you not hear the crying of newborns behind the wall? How could you not smell that scent that permeated the whole house? [music] Raymond monotonically repeated his version.

He worked 12 to 14 hours a day.

He left early in the morning when the house was still quiet and returned late in the evening.

[music] He often went on business trips, sometimes for several days in a row.

He only appeared at home to sleep and he slept in the basement.

The basement.

[music] This room was a key element of his defense.

Raymon claimed that for the last several years he had lived almost completely separately from Erica.

In his [music] words, a rift had long ago developed between them.

She became increasingly withdrawn, strange, secretive.

Erica categorically did not want him to go upstairs.

She said that it was a terrible mess there, that she was ashamed before him, and she would definitely deal with everything herself.

Raymond did not insist.

It was psychologically easier for him to agree than to get into a conflict.

He equipped a living space for himself in the basement, put in a bed, a television, a small refrigerator.

There was a separate entrance from the backyard, and he could come and go without passing through the main part of the house at all.

And he actively used this.

In his words, he had not gone up to the second floor in years, literally years.

He saw that the first floor was cluttered, but he wrote it off as Erica’s prolonged depression.

He just gave her money for the household and thought that was enough.

He chose the tactic not to know the details, and he really didn’t know them.

The story sounded almost unbelievable.

But the investigators were obliged to check it.

They interviewed the neighbors again, this time with specific questions exactly about Raymond.

Had they seen him entering through the front door? Had they seen him with Erica together? Had they heard conversations, quarrels, or any signs of a normal family life? The answers proved discouraging for the prosecution.

Neighbors confirmed they saw Raymond extremely rarely, mostly only leaving in his car early in the morning or returning late in the evening.

He indeed almost always used only the back entrance.

Residents of the block practically never saw him together with Erica.

There were no signs that these two functioned as a couple.

One of the neighbors remembered that several years ago Raymond had complained to him about problems in the relationship.

He said that Erica had changed a lot, that it had become impossible to talk to her, and he was thinking of moving out, but he never moved out.

It was his house, his property, [music] and he had nowhere else to go.

Another neighbor said that once he saw Raymond carrying trash bags out of the basement, only from the basement, not from the main house.

It seemed he was responsible only for his own territory and fundamentally did not touch the rest of the chaos.

The picture that emerged was strange but internally consistent.

Raymond Rivera truly could have lived in the same building and yet existed in a parallel reality.

Not because he was blind or stupid, but because it was more convenient for him not to see.

Because he consciously chose the path of criminal ignorance.

Investigators studied his work schedule, requested data from his employer, and checked [music] business trip documents.

Everything was confirmed.

Raymond indeed worked a lot and was often absent.

In some periods, he did not appear at home for weeks.

They also checked his finances.

He regularly transferred money to a joint account for groceries, utilities, and other expenses.

Erica managed this money herself, and he did not control the spending or ask for receipts.

He just paid and considered his duty done.

This was not a classic defense of an innocent man.

This was the defense of a man who built a wall between himself and the nightmare.

No, from a legal point of view, this was not enough for a charge of complicity.

Prosecutors consulted with detectives to charge Raymon with involvement in what happened to the three found in boxes.

Evidence of his awareness was needed.

It was necessary to show that he knew what was happening and did nothing.

However, there was no such evidence.

Not a single witness saw him on the second floor.

Not a single document linked him to Erica’s secret pregnancies.

Not a single piece of evidence pointed to the fact that he knew about the contents of the closet.

His fingerprints were found in the basement and in the kitchen and nowhere else in the house.

He truly did not visit the rooms where the tragedy unfolded.

But the investigation could not let Raymond go entirely.

During a search in the basement, forensic experts found a small hiding place behind a false wall.

inside bags of a forbidden white powder.

Examination confirmed the presence of forbidden substances.

In addition, the charge of neglect of duties remained.

Even if he didn’t know about the younger ones, he definitely knew of the existence of the two older ones.

And he did nothing to protect them from living in the dirt.

In October 2014, Raymon Rivera was officially charged possession of forbidden substances and neglect of duties toward those in his care.

This was not the charge, but it was enough for him to end up behind bars.

The prosecutor’s office offered him a deal.

Some of the charges would be dropped in exchange for cooperation.

Raymon had to testify against Erica and tell everything he knew about her condition and how their strange household functioned.

Raymond agreed.

He had no other choice.

His lawyer explained to him, “Either he helps the prosecution or the investigation will find a way to tie him to more serious episodes.” Thus, Raymond Rivera turned from a potential accomplice into the main witness.

A man who for years had closed his eyes to the horror in his own home.

Now had to help send the woman he had lived with for over 10 years behind bars.

And Erica Murray was still sitting in the county jail.

She had still not been officially charged in the episodes with the fines in the closet.

The prosecutor’s office was waiting, waiting for the results of additional examinations.

[music] And Raymond’s official testimony, hoping to build a case that would withstand the scrutiny of the court.

Detectives clearly understood.

To build a truly convincing case, they needed to realize exactly whom they were dealing with.

Erica Murray remained a mystery to the investigation.

A woman who lived among rotting trash for years, giving birth to one child after another and hiding the frightening consequences in cardboard boxes.

What exactly led her to this point? Was it an innate personality defect or did a fatal break occur later? First thing, investigators checked her criminal history.

The result was unexpected.

Erica Murray had absolutely no past related to the law.

No arrests, no priors, not even a small fine before the police was an absolutely blank slate.

She had never fallen into the view of the authorities before the very August day in 2014.

This was extremely unusual for a person accused of such grave crimes.

Usually such cases are followed by a trail, minor lawbreaking or addictions.

With Erica, a frightening social void, investigators collected piece by piece information about a woman who for many years existed in this world, leaving almost no traces.

Erica was born into a workingclass family in Massachusetts.

Her father worked at a factory.

Her mother was a homemaker.

Her brother and sister an ordinary social cell like thousands in New England.

She graduated from school without any major problems.

Not a top student, but not an outsider.

Quiet, inconspicuous, always keeping to herself.

Teachers struggled to remember her image, describing her as a withdrawn girl who had no close friends, but did not create problems for those around her.

After school, Erica changed several low-skilled jobs.

Cashier, laundry assistant, motel cleaner.

She didn’t stay anywhere for long, quitting due to absenteeism.

Later, she met Raymond Rivera.

He was older, had a stable job in housing.

For Erica, it seemed like a way out, a way to escape her parents’ house.

They moved in together almost immediately after meeting.

Investigators talked to her relatives.

Her mother had passed away earlier and her father suffered from dementia, but her older sister agreed to a meeting.

She told a story that began to fill in the frightening gaps.

According to her, Erica had always been strange, unsociable, and preferred solitude.

She didn’t know how to make friends and couldn’t read social cues that others understood intuitively.

At school, she was often bullied, which forced her to withdraw even deeper into herself.

When Erica moved in with Raymond, the family felt relieved, hoping she had found her place.

For the first few years, everything looked normal.

The sister saw the house was clean, and Erica seemed calm.

The turning point came after the appearance of the first child.

Erica became even more secretive, stopped answering calls and refused visits.

When her sister did manage to break inside, the woman looked exhausted and psychologically detached.

The house gradually changed.

At first, it was just a mess, but with each visit, the situation grew worse.

Things piled up in layers, dirt accumulated, and the smell in the rooms intensified.

The sister tried to offer help with cleaning, but Erica reacted with a detachment, assuring her that she was managing everything herself.

Over time, the visit stopped altogether.

Erica stopped opening the door.

Raymon justified her behavior as depression.

The last time the sister was in the house on St.

Paul Street was 5 years before the arrest.

Erica spoke through a crack in the door, looking emaciated with absolutely empty eyes.

The relative wanted to call the authorities, but there was no formal reason.

[music] a reluctance to communicate and unsanitary conditions are not crimes for an adult.

Thus, Erica effectively turned into a ghost within her own walls.

[music] During the investigation and preparation for court hearings, leading experts were brought in, including Dr.

Dooo Guera and Dr.

Judith Etersheim.

Based on their analyses, three likely diagnoses were identified.

The first was hoarding disorder.

People with this disorder build walls of trash, creating a physical barrier between themselves and the world.

The second [music] was a dissociative disorder, allowing the psyche to completely disconnect from reality.

Erica could physically be in the filth, but her brain created a version of reality where everything was normal.

The third was deep depression with elements of [music] psychosis, which caused a total loss of motivation.

Most likely, it was a combination of these disorders reinforcing [music] each other.

Over the years, Erica received no help and simply slowly drowned in her personal hell.

In this state, she continued to find herself pregnant seven times over many years.

[music] Each time, she handled it alone.

She managed to keep four children alive, while the other findings ended up in the closet.

Psychiatrists suggested that Erica might not even have realized the difference between the living and those who had stopped breathing in her damaged [music] consciousness.

The boundaries between them were blurred.

This was not the story of a conscious monster, but the tragedy of a person who had [music] broken so completely that she lost touch with reality.

However, from a legal standpoint, mental abnormalities could only become a mitigating factor, not exempting Murray from responsibility for everything that happened on St.

Paul Street.

Over those long, terrible years.

On September 20th, 2014, the prosecutor’s office was finally ready for the decisive interrogation.

The investigation had accumulated all available resources, [music] the results of complex examinations, detailed testimony from Raymond, evidence from the older son, and shocking photographs from the house.

Now, detectives needed to get answers from Erica herself to the questions that had plagued law enforcement for the past month.

Erica was brought from the county jail under heavy escort.

Over the past weeks, her appearance had visibly changed.

She had lost even more weight and deep shadows lay under her eyes, but her facial expression remained the same, absolutely empty and detached.

It seemed as though what was happening concerned someone else, but not her.

Two experienced detectives and an assistant prosecutor were waiting for the suspect in the interrogation room.

A bulky folder of materials lay on the table.

Erica silently sat opposite them, folded her hands on her knees and stared at the wall with her usual gaze into nowhere.

A stateappointed lawyer sat nearby.

He warned his client of her rights and explained the possibility of completely refusing to answer.

Erica gave only a barely noticeable nod, but from her appearance, it was difficult to tell if she realized the meaning of those words.

>> [music] >> The interrogation began with standard procedures.

Her name.

The woman answered mechanically and monotonically.

Then the investigators moved to the main point.

A detective placed a photograph of the bedroom closet in front of her.

Erica looked at the picture without any visible reaction.

People usually look at pictures of furniture in an advertising catalog with the same indifference.

Next was a photograph of a cardboard box sealed with tape.

Erica remained silent.

Her face did not change one iota.

When asked if she recognized the object, the woman only dryly confirmed that she did.

The detective clarified if she knew at the time exactly what was inside.

A pause followed, after which she gave an affirmative answer.

The investigator did not show the next frames as the images of the contents were too distressing.

Instead, he placed the medical examiner’s report on the table, three pages describing three findings, those who were never given a chance at life.

Erica was asked directly if these findings were her biological offspring.

She answered affirmatively without the slightest hesitation.

The detective asked exactly when this had happened.

Erica furrowed her brow trying to reconstruct the chronology, but the dates were confused in her mind.

She named approximate years of 2006, 2008, and 2011, but admitted she was not sure of the accuracy.

[music] Time had long lost its meaning for her.

Then the detective moved on to the details of what had occurred.

Erica described the process in the same flat voice.

She said that she handled it absolutely alone without doctors or anyone’s support.

The woman simply lay on the mattress and waited for the process to end.

She claimed that she managed on her own exactly as she knew how.

The investigators recorded every word.

What she described was a medical nightmare without antiseptics or assistance.

then followed the difficult question about exactly what happened to the three found in the closet.

Erica was silent for a long time before beginning to give her statement.

The woman insisted that two of the three showed no signs of life immediately after birth.

She claimed she didn’t know if they were alive at all as they didn’t scream or breathe.

According to the suspect, once she realized they were not responding, she simply placed them in boxes.

The detective clarified whether she had tried to call emergency services or do anything at all.

Erica admitted she made no such attempts.

She explained this by saying she didn’t know how to proceed and was overcome by paralyzing fear.

The woman emphasized that she didn’t want anyone to know about it.

Her desire was to make the problem that had arisen just [music] disappear.

She packed them up, sealed them with tape, and pushed them deep into the closet, after which she tried to erase it from her memory.

But there was a third [music] case.

Erica admitted that one of the three lived for several days after birth.

She could not name an exact period, only stating that the infant lived for a very short time.

According to her, it breathed and moved and then everything suddenly stopped.

The detective asked her to clarify what happened that night.

Erica stated she didn’t know.

According to her version, one morning she simply walked over and the baby was no longer breathing.

She insisted she didn’t know the reason.

After that, she did the same as in the previous times.

Box, tape, and complete oblivion in the closet.

This testimony fundamentally changed the legal picture.

If one of the three had lived for several days, it meant the child was born alive.

This meant the termination of the life of a being that had already begun its path.

The detectives tried to get details about where exactly the infant was, if she fed it, and what she did when it cried.

Erica answered in fragments.

She claimed the baby just lay on the floor and sometimes she gave it something.

She didn’t remember the details.

Everything was like a thick fog.

The investigator asked directly if she had taken actions to intentionally speed up the outcome.

Erica shook her head negatively, insisting on her lack of involvement.

She claimed she did nothing.

She simply didn’t know how to care for the infant, and its life faded away on its own.

Her story was devoid of emotional color.

She spoke of her offspring as if they were annoying nuisances.

In her speech, there were no words of regret or remorse.

The woman simply stated facts, as if discussing a piece of malfunctioning old equipment.

A psychologist observing the interrogation through a one-way mirror later noted in a report that Erica Murray’s level of emotional coldness was unprecedented.

She had either suppressed her feelings so deeply that she lost all access to them, or she was fundamentally devoid of the capacity for empathy in the conventional sense.

The interrogation lasted another 2 hours.

The detectives tried to fish out any clue pointing to direct criminal intent, but she only repeated that she didn’t know what to do, was very afraid, and just wanted it all to disappear quickly.

At the very end, the assistant prosecutor asked if she realized she had committed a serious act.

Erica was silent for a while before replying that yes, perhaps she understood that now.

[music] She admitted that she shouldn’t have hidden them in the closet and should have called specialists, but she didn’t do it because she couldn’t imagine how she would explain everything to the people around her.

This was a confession, but not the one the prosecution was counting on.

Erica admitted to the concealment.

She admitted she didn’t seek help and lived for years just a meter away from the boxes in her bedroom.

But she never admitted that she intentionally took a life.

According to her version, two were still born and the third faded away on its own without her active interference.

And given that the medical examination could not establish the exact cause of death due to the condition of the remains, proving otherwise in court was practically impossible.

The Worcester County District Attorney’s Office found itself in an extremely difficult and ambiguous situation.

The investigation had a confession, but not at all the confession they expected to hear for the final closing of the case.

Erica Murray confirmed the facts of what had occurred.

She confirmed that she had given birth to three infants and personally hidden them in boxes, but she categorically did not confirm that she intentionally ended their existence.

Without this key link, the charge of the most serious crime literally fell apart.

In American law, the line between a tragic accident and an intentional act is sometimes thin.

But it is precisely this line that determines decades of prison time.

October 2014, the team of prosecutors gathered for an emergency meeting to decide how to proceed in the face of this deadlock.

All the materials of the case gathered over weeks of grueling work lay on the office desk.

Expert conclusions from the medical examiner’s office, transcripts of hours of interrogations, [music] witness statements, and forensic photographs from the House of Horrors.

Hundreds of pages of documents and not [music] a single direct ironclad piece of evidence of intent.

The silence in the room was interrupted only by the rustling of papers behind which were hidden the fates of those who never saw the light of day.

The defense had already clearly and firmly outlined its position.

Erica Murray’s lawyer persistently promoted the version that all three found in the boxes were still born.

From a legal standpoint, such an outcome is a terrible personal tragedy, but not a criminal offense.

Certainly, concealing the remains is a serious violation of the law and sanitary standards.

But that is a completely different charge, carrying entirely different sentences, [music] incomparable to the punishment demanded by an outraged public.

The prosecutors clearly understood.

If the case went to court solely on the charge of intentional murder, the jury might acquit Erica on the main most serious counts.

No direct medical evidence meant no guilty verdict.

This is a basic principle of American justice, an unshakable law.

Any irrediable doubt must be interpreted in favor of the accused.

But no one was going to give up.

The investigation began to look for another way.

Not through direct evidence, but through a powerful accumulation of circumstantial evidence.

Each piece separately meant little to the cold letter of the law, but together they created a frightening picture that was impossible to ignore.

The first element of this chain was the testimony of the older son.

He told social workers about the twilight life in the house on St.

Paul Street.

He spoke of how in the silence of the rooms, younger children suddenly appeared.

He spoke of Erica’s screams at night, which invariably meant that soon there would be one more inhabitant in the house.

and he spoke of the crying, a thin, heart-rending crying that sometimes rang out behind closed doors after those terrible nights.

Crying.

This became the key word for the investigative team.

The eldest son remembered hearing this sound after the appearance of some of those who then disappeared without a trace.

Not all of them, but some.

He couldn’t say exactly which ones.

He couldn’t name dates or describe the circumstances in detail as he himself was in a state of prolonged stress.

But he clearly remembered the sound.

The sound that only a living being makes.

A being that breathes, that feels pain and cold, that tries to draw attention to its appearance in this world.

If this crying really occurred, it meant that at least one of the three in the boxes had been born alive.

It meant the version that they never took a first breath was a lie in all three cases.

The second element was the physical condition of the four children found alive.

Medical reports from the hospital painted a monstrous picture of years of neglect, extreme emaciation on the brink of starvation, severe dehydration, numerous infections, profound developmental delays.

The younger ones could not speak, although they should have long ago.

The older ones couldn’t read and barely understood the world around them.

a complete lack of social skills and an ignorance of the simplest things any peer would know.

These four survived in that hell but only just.

They balanced on the thin line between life and death.

And only the intervention of the neighbors and the police saved them from the same fate as those who ended up in the closet.

The prosecutors use this as an indisputable argument.

If Erica Murray treated those she formerly left alive so monstrously, how did she treat those whose existence she decided to hide from the start? If the survivors were brought to such a state with minimal care, what actually happened to those she didn’t care for at all? It was a logical chain that led to an inevitable conclusion.

Erica created conditions in which survival was merely a matter of chance.

Some accidentally survived, others accidentally did not.

And this lack of care was not a mistake but a conscious system.

The third element was Erica herself and her frightening behavior.

Years of total isolation from the world.

A categorical refusal of any medical help.

Concealing her pregnancies even from her partner Raymond Rivera who lived in the same house.

Concealing the very fact of the appearance of new lives and then concealing that these lives had suddenly ended.

Erica didn’t call an ambulance when she realized one of them wasn’t breathing.

She didn’t call the police.

She didn’t turn to relatives.

She simply took a cardboard box, placed the remains inside, sealed it with tape, and pushed it deep into the closet.

And then Erica continued to live in the same room, sleep on the same dirty mattress, and walk past that same closet every day, months after month, year after year.

This was the behavior of a person coolly hiding the traces of a crime.

Not a mother who had experienced a tragedy and didn’t know how to cope.

A person in grief seeks support.

A person in panic makes mistakes but then tries to correct them.

Erica didn’t either.

She simply hid it and forgot or pretended to forget, forever erasing them from reality.

The fourth element was her own testimony recorded on film.

The prosecutors returned again and again to the recordings of the interrogations, listening to every intonation and every wording Erica used.

She didn’t speak like a mother who had experienced an unbearable loss.

She didn’t speak like a person lost in the labyrinths of her own mind.

Murray gave testimony like a subject who had committed something reprehensible and was now trying to minimize her [music] own responsibility.

In one of the most difficult interrogations, when the investigator directly asked why she decided to place the remains in a box instead of calling emergency services, Erica answered with frightening simplicity.

She did it because she did it.

She could not or would not explain the reasons.

It just happened that way.

This phrase became central to the prosecution’s position, not because it directly proved intent, but because it demonstrated an absolute chilling alienation from what had been done.

Erica spoke about the concealment of her own offspring.

The way people talk about household trash thrown away because it is no longer needed without a shadow of emotion, without painful reflection, without the slightest sign that the scale of the catastrophe had reached her consciousness.

The prosecutors skillfully used this icy calm against the defense’s line.

If Erica was in a state of paralysis and shock, where did she get the ability to describe her actions so consistently and dryly? Where did this frightening detachment come from? Which confused even seasoned detectives? [music] The defense countered, “This is exactly the quintessence of dissociation.

Erica completely cut herself off from emotions because her wounded psyche could not bear the truth of what had been done.

Her calm was not the sign of a cold-blooded monster, but a defense mechanism of a deeply traumatized personality.

This dispute between psychiatrists and lawyers continued for weeks.

Both sides showered each other with research, references to judicial precedents, and [music] quotes from medical literature.

But in the end, it was not the people in white coats who would decide Erica Murray’s fate, but 12 ordinary jurors.

ordinary people who would have to look into the empty eyes of the woman from Blackstone and decide who she really was.

A cold-blooded criminal or a tragic victim of her own shattered mind.

While the lawyers and prosecutors honed their eloquence before the future legal battles, the investigation reached the final stretch.

They had to complete the final darkest stage of the work, a full minute-by-minute reconstruction of events.

The detectives needed to reconstruct the chronology of the many years of life in the House of Horrors on St.

Paul Street.

From the moment of the first hidden pregnancy to the last box pushed deep into the closet, it was a journey from the image of an ordinary quiet woman to [music] the creature Erica had become during her years of seclusion.

The truth was hidden behind mountains of trash, and the investigation was determined to bring it to light.

Investigators finally put all the pieces of this monstrous puzzle together.

Before them lay the [music] testimony of the eldest son, the incoherent confessions of Erica herself, the results of complex examinations and hundreds of photographs capturing the chaos inside the house.

Now, from these fragments, they needed to reconstruct a complete chronology [music] to understand what daily life behind the closed doors of the house on St.

Paul Street actually looked like.

The investigation had to grasp not individual flashes of madness, but the entire multi-year lingering [music] nightmare in its entirety.

The picture that emerged during this reconstruction was scarier than any thriller.

In movies, there is usually a clear villain, a victim, and a moment [music] of climax after which everything changes.

But here, there was nothing of the kind.

Here there was a slow multi-year descent into the abyss without dramatic turns, without sudden realizations, and without a single attempt to stop.

It was a process of decay that occurred in total silence, hidden behind the ordinary curtains of an ordinary house.

It all started around 2001.

Erica and Raymond had just moved in together, and then their house was completely ordinary, clean, and unremarkable.

Erica became pregnant almost immediately.

The first of seven children was born in 2002.

[music] That same boy would many years later become the eyes and ears of the investigation in that house.

In those first years, Erica was still coping with her responsibilities, or at least very successfully pretending to.

But even then, the seeds that would later turn her life into a catastrophe began to sprout inside her.

She went out less and less.

She communicated less and less with neighbors and relatives.

She spent more and more time within four walls, among things that gradually began to take over her living space.

A second pregnancy, then a third.

The trash in the rooms accumulated.

Layers of dust and dirt piled on top of each other.

But Erica continued to function at some minimal, almost automatic level.

The older ones grew, the younger ones were born, and the family’s life flowed in its strange isolated channel.

The turning point, according to the investigation, came around 2006.

Erica was pregnant again.

Raymond, by that time, had practically moved to the basement.

Their relationship had finally broken down, and he preferred to stay as far away as possible from what their daily life was [music] becoming.

Erica was left practically alone with small children in her arms and another pregnancy she didn’t want.

Everything went the same as all the previous times, at home, alone, without doctors or any support.

The woman simply stayed in the bedroom among the piles of things and waited for the process to end.

But this time, it ended differently.

Someone new came into the world, but didn’t make a sound.

He didn’t breathe or show signs of life.

Erica looked at him, but the thought of getting help did not enter her mind.

She didn’t scream, didn’t call Raymond, didn’t dial the emergency services.

She simply took what was at hand, an ordinary cardboard box, and hid her secret in it.

Adhesive tape helped seal the secret, and the box was sent deep into the wall closet.

Erica simply returned to her normal life as if nothing had happened.

The investigation believed this was the first case, the first secret she hid, not only from the world, but also from herself.

2 years later, around 2008, the story repeated itself.

Another hidden pregnancy, another time alone among the trash, and another child who didn’t survive.

A second box took its place in the same closet next to the first.

For Erica, this became a kind of mechanical solution to the problem.

If something went wrong, she simply put it out of sight, sealing it in cardboard.

This wasn’t a flare up of rage.

It was a cold, routine action that allowed her to continue existing without changing anything in her life.

The third case occurred around 2011 and it was fundamentally different from the previous ones.

According to Erica herself, this infant lived for several days.

He breathed, moved, and made a weak sound.

The eldest son later confirmed this to the investigation.

He clearly remembered the crying that rang out from his mother’s bedroom for several days and then suddenly stopped.

Exactly what happened during those days in that stuffy, cluttered room remains a secret.

Erica said she didn’t remember the details, [music] that everything was like a thick fog, but the outcome was the same.

A third sealed bundle was placed on the closet shelf with the others.

Now there were three of them hidden behind the door she walked past dozens of times a day.

And all this time, between 2006 and 2014, others continue to live in that house.

Those four who would later be found alive in that hell.

They grew up among rotting food remains and insects.

They played in rooms where it was impossible to breathe.

And every day they walked past that very closet where the remains of their siblings were kept.

They heard sounds at night, saw new people suddenly appear in the house, [music] and saw some of them just as suddenly disappear.

The eldest son told investigators that he perceived all this as completely normal.

He simply didn’t know another life.

For him, it was natural that it was always dark and dirty in the house, that food appeared irregularly, and that his mother sometimes screamed at night in her room.

He didn’t understand that something beyond comprehension was hidden behind the closet door.

He didn’t even realize that his own existence was not a normal human life, but a slow fading away in conditions that no one should ever have to endure.

The reconstruction carried out by the investigation showed the most important thing.

This was not a single crime committed in a fit of madness.

It was a [music] long multi-year process of decay.

The decay of a mother’s psyche, the decay of a home, and the decay of human essence itself.

In that space, life in the absence of it existed side by side in absolute mundanity.

Dirt covered everything.

Both those who were still breathing and those who had stopped breathing many years ago.

Erica Murray continued to function at a primitive animal level.

finally erasing the boundaries between the normal and the nightmare in her own consciousness.

The investigation completed the reconstruction by the end of November 2014.

The full picture was ready and it was so horrific in its simplicity that it shocked even experienced detectives.

[music] They had dates, they had motives, and they had an understanding of how this terrible system of concealment worked.

Now only the final task remained to present all these facts to the court and wait for the verdict that would draw a line under this story.

[music] The trial of Erica Murray began in June 2019.

Almost 5 years were spent on preparation, endless examinations, interrogations, and hearings on procedural issues.

The case was unprecedented and both sides prepared for a decisive legal battle.

The prosecution brought charges on several counts, the main one being secondderee murder in three instances.

Erica was also charged with the cruelty toward the survivors and the intentional concealment of remains in unsanitary conditions.

The defense built its line on two arguments.

First was Erica’s mental state.

The lawyers insisted she was deeply ill and needed treatment, not prison.

The second argument was technical.

The lack of direct evidence that those found in the boxes were born alive.

This was the key question.

According to the law, without the indisputable fact of a first breath, a murder charge is impossible, and medical science, due to the condition of the remains, was never able to give an unambiguous answer.

The trial lasted several weeks.

Judge Doris Carter Morrison heard the case alone without a jury.

Photos from the house were shown in the courtroom and recordings of Erica’s interrogations were played where her monotonous voice, devoid of emotion, described what had happened.

The prosecutors relied on an accumulation of circumstantial evidence.

The eldest son’s testimony about the crying and Erica’s own admission that one of those found in the boxes lived for several days.

The defense countered that the memories of a traumatized teenager were unreliable and that the defendant’s own words were merely the result of mental disorientation.

After several days of deliberation, the judge announced the verdict.

On the most serious charges, murder Erica Murray was acquitted.

The court concluded that the prosecution had not provided sufficient scientific evidence that those found in the boxes had been born alive.

However, on the remaining count’s cruel treatment of the survivors, creating a threat to their lives, and concealment of remains, the verdict was guilty.

The judge sentenced her to 68 years in prison, taking into account the time she had spent in custody since 2014.

Her term was effectively coming to an end.

In 2021, Erica Murray was released on parole.

7 years behind bars.

That was the outcome for many years of a hidden nightmare.

For the boxes found in the closet and for four crippled young people who had nearly died in piles of trash.

Society found the conclusion unjust.

But in the justice system, the law remains the law.

Without irrefutable medical evidence, it is impossible to prove the most terrible of acts.

Erica Murray received exactly what the prosecution could confirm within the rules.

Her story remains in the archives as one of the most frightening testimonies of how deep human indifference can go.

Hidden behind the door of an ordinary house, the house on St.

Paul Street did not stand for long after the police finished their work.

Sanitary services declared it a biological hazard.

The level of contamination was such that restoration made no sense.

At the end of 2014, the building was demolished.

Bulldozers leveled the site where a hidden nightmare had unfolded for many years.

Today, that plot is an ordinary vacant lot.

Neighbors try not to look in its direction, and those who remember the events prefer not to speak of them.

The four survivors were immediately placed under state guardianship.

Their further fates are protected by confidentiality laws, and that is the only correct decision.

They deserved a chance at a normal life far from the cameras.

It is known only that after long rehabilitation, all four were placed in foster families under new names.

Raymond Rivera received a suspended sentence and completely disappeared from the public eye.

Where he is now and how his life turned out after the trial remains unknown.

This case became a painful precedent for the state of Massachusetts.

It raised questions about how society manages to miss distress signals.

How neighbors can live next to a living hell for years and notice nothing.

How social services fail to see those in desperate need of help.

And how mental disorders go ignored until it is too late.

Erica Murray was released in 2021.

She simply dissolved into the crowd and her name disappeared from the news as quietly as she herself once disappeared from society, locking herself in her bedroom.

But the story of the house on St.

Paul Street remains.

It serves as a bitter reminder that sometimes the most terrible things happen not in dark alleys, but behind the closed doors of ordinary houses in quiet suburbs where everyone is sure they know their neighbors, and the silence behind the wall seems like a sign of peace.

when in reality it may hide a true abyss.