They Made a Gruesome Discovery in a Target Parking Lot And the Trail Led to the One Person Nobody Expected
In June of 2005, someone walked into a gas station in Derry, New Hampshire, and paid cash for a prepaid cell phone.
They cut open the packaging in the parking lot.
When the customer service rep asked for a name to activate the account, the person on the line paused.
Because the whole point of buying this phone — paying cash, using no credit card, leaving no paper trail — was to make sure no one could trace the calls back to them.
They gave a fake name.
Eight days later, a man named Jack Reed was dead.
His body was wrapped in plastic and hidden in the back of his own dump truck, left to bake in a Target parking lot forty miles from his home.
And the prepaid phone — the one purchased specifically to disappear — was the thread that unraveled everything.
This is a story about a grudge.
About what one man decided Jack owed him.
And about a log book, a name scrawled in a hurry, and a barn that had been scrubbed completely clean.
PART ONE: THE MAN WITH THE LOTTERY TICKET
Jack Reed had built his life out of nothing.
He grew up in the foster care system in New Hampshire — no stability, no inheritance, no safety net of any kind. Whatever he had as an adult, he had made himself.
By the summer of 2005, Jack was fifty-seven years old. He drove a large red and black dump truck. He ran a small trucking business that handled garbage removal, moving jobs, and odd hauling work around the Derry area. He lived frugally — a rented trailer parked behind a warehouse on the edge of town — specifically so he could save money.
Jack had a plan.
He'd gotten the idea a couple of years earlier when he did a moving job for a local self-made millionaire who was relocating from New Hampshire to Las Vegas. The man had built his fortune from scratch, same as Jack was trying to do. Jack looked at him and saw a version of himself that was possible. A real, tangible destination.
His goal was to save enough to retire to Vegas once his son Jack Jr. finished school.
That was the dream. Warm weather, no more New Hampshire winters, a life that felt like a reward for forty years of hard work.
On the afternoon of June 25th, 2005, Jack stood at a park in Derry holding a margarita — he almost never drank, but today was an exception — watching his daughter Megan laugh at a picnic table with her brother and their mother, Virginia.
It was Megan's high school graduation party.
Jack felt the particular pride of a man who had broken a cycle.
He had given his kids something he never had. Stability. Structure. A real shot.
The only slight tension in the afternoon was when Megan's boyfriend Walter walked across the grass toward them. Jack wasn't thrilled about the fact that Megan and Walter had moved in together recently — she was only eighteen, and Jack felt strongly that she was too young for that. But today was not the day for that conversation. So when Walter approached, Jack got up, gave him a hug, and told him he was glad he could make it.
He meant it, mostly.
That evening, on the drive home, Jack stopped at a gas station for fuel and a lottery ticket. He was a regular player. He had never hit anything big, but he always believed the next one might be different.
He scratched the ticket at his kitchen table that night. He didn't win.
But he tucked the ticket in his pocket anyway, slid it in alongside the small, ordinary hope that next time would be his break.
On the morning of Monday, June 27th, Jack climbed into his dump truck and headed out for a trash disposal job in Derry.
It was already hot before 9 a.m.
As he drove, his cell phone rang.
The man on the other end said his name was Charlie. He had heard Jack did hauling work. He had a barn out in Deerfield — about thirty miles away — that needed to be cleaned out. Could Jack come by that afternoon?
Jack said sure.
He grabbed his log book off the passenger seat, flipped to a blank page, and scribbled down Charlie's name and the address: 145 North Road.
He told Charlie he'd call when he was on his way.
Then he hung up and kept driving.
That was the last confirmed phone call Jack Reed ever received from someone who wasn't planning to kill him.
PART TWO: THE LOG BOOK
Two days later, on the afternoon of June 29th, Megan pulled up to her father's trailer with Walter in the passenger seat.
The dump truck wasn't there.
She felt it immediately — that specific, hollow anxiety of something being wrong that you can't quite name yet.
Her mother Virginia had called about an hour earlier. Jack had missed a scheduled job that morning. He wasn't answering his phone. This wasn't like him.
Megan had assumed he'd overslept. Maybe he forgot. But now, looking at the empty space where the dump truck should have been, she understood that he had left for work — and never arrived.
She knocked on the trailer door anyway. No answer.
She called her mother. Virginia drove over. The three of them — Megan, Walter, Virginia — stood in the gravel lot all afternoon calling Jack's phone every fifteen minutes.
Every call went straight to voicemail.
At 6:30 that evening, they called the police.
---
For the first few days, Detective Mike Hool of the Derry Police Department wasn't alarmed.
Adults went missing sometimes. They drove off, needed space, came back. Jack had no known enemies. His family couldn't think of a single reason anyone would want to hurt him.
Hool figured Jack would turn up.
Then, on the morning of July 5th — six days after the missing persons report — Megan called again.
The family had been putting up flyers around town. Someone had called to say they'd seen Jack's dump truck at a Target store in Saugus, Massachusetts.
Forty miles from Derry.
Hool got in his car.
He found the truck at the back of the parking lot, parked near the far corner, away from most of the other cars. The license plate confirmed it was Jack's. The cab was empty.
But there were flies buzzing at the back of the truck.
And a smell — faint but unmistakable, the kind that doesn't need to be explained — drifting from beneath the tarp that covered the truck's open bed.
Hool put on gloves. He climbed up the side of the truck.
He pulled back the tarp.
Beneath it, something was wrapped tightly in layers of plastic sheeting.
He cut through it.
Less than an hour later, workers from the medical examiner's office loaded Jack Reed's body into their van, still wrapped, sealed for evidence.
Hool stood in the parking lot and looked at the truck.
Forty miles from home. Wrapped in plastic. Hidden under a tarp in a Target parking lot on a Tuesday afternoon.
This was planned, he thought.
And whoever did it knew Jack.
Back at the truck, once forensics had swept and photographed everything, Hool opened the driver's side door with gloved hands. No blood in the cab. No weapon visible. Nothing obviously useful.
Until he saw the log book tucked into the pocket on the passenger door.
He pulled it out and flipped through it.
The last scheduled job was the morning of June 27th — back in Derry, same as always. But a few pages later, on an otherwise blank page, was a single entry scrawled in what looked like a hurry.
145 North Road.
Charlie.
No town listed. No phone number. Just a name and an address.
Hool placed the log book in an evidence bag and sealed it.
Then he looked up and noticed the security cameras on the light posts all around the lot.
One of them was pointed directly at where Jack's truck was parked.
PART THREE: THE AUTOPSY AND THE FOOTAGE
The next morning, Hool was reading the autopsy report at his desk in Derry.
The medical examiner had documented broken ribs, skull fractures, and a softball-sized hole in the side of Jack's head. His face had been so severely damaged that investigators had to pull his dental records to confirm the identity.
The level of violence felt personal.
This wasn't a robbery gone sideways. This wasn't an accident.
Whoever did this had been angry.
Hool was still sitting with that when there was a knock at his office door. An officer leaned in and asked him to come take a look at something.
Down the hall, a team of investigators had been going through the Target security footage.
They pulled up a clip timestamped around 5:30 p.m. on June 27th — the same evening of the last job in Jack's log book.
Hool watched as Jack's dump truck rolled into the parking lot. Behind it, following closely, was a white minivan.
The truck parked. Two people got out of it.
The footage was grainy and dark. Hool couldn't tell if they were men or women, couldn't see their faces, couldn't make out anything useful.
But what they were doing was obvious.
One of them walked to the back of the truck and checked the tarp. The other waited. Then both of them walked to the white minivan, got in, and drove away.
At least three people, Hool thought. Two in the truck. One driving the minivan.
The investigator then pulled up a second clip.
This one was from a different camera, on the other side of the lot, and it was timestamped July 4th — seven days after the truck was left in the lot, and one day before Hool found it.
The angle on this camera was much closer. Better detail.
A car pulled into the lot. A young woman got out of the passenger seat and walked toward the store.
Hool leaned in.
He recognized her.
It was Megan Reed. Jack's daughter.
She had been in the same parking lot as her father's body — one day before police found it.
PART FOUR: THE INTERROGATION
Later that day, Hool walked into an interrogation room where Megan was waiting.
He shook her hand. He smiled. He sat down across from her and kept his voice level and sympathetic, giving no indication that he was already looking at her as a suspect.
He didn't bring up the footage.
He didn't have to.
Megan brought it up herself.
She said she had been in that Target parking lot recently. She knew how it looked, and she wanted to explain. Walter's sister lived in Saugus. They had gone to visit her for the Fourth of July to take their minds off her father's disappearance. They ended up staying overnight and had made a last-minute run to Target for a contact lens case.
She shook her head.
"I can't believe he was right there," she said. "I was so close to him."
Hool listened carefully.
The story wasn't impossible. In the security footage, Megan hadn't gone anywhere near the corner of the lot where the truck was parked. She had walked straight into the store.
But there was something else he was focused on.
He had already reviewed what Megan told officers when she first reported Jack missing. She had said the last time she saw her father was the night of Monday, June 27th. She and Walter had stopped by the trailer to pick up an air conditioner.
That was now provably false.
The security footage showed Jack's body was already in that parking lot by 5:30 p.m. on June 27th. He was dead before Megan claimed to have visited him.
So Hool looked at her across the table and asked, calmly: "When was the last time you saw your father?"
Without hesitating, Megan said, "The night of the 27th."
"You're positive about the date?"
"Yes. Absolutely."
Hool thanked her and let her go.
He brought Walter in next, separately.
Walter gave the exact same answers. The sister in Saugus. The contact lens case. The last time they saw Jack — June 27th, the night.
Both of them, same story, same details, same date.
To Hool, consistency like that didn't signal innocence.
It signaled rehearsal.
PART FIVE: THE NAME CHARLIE
The following afternoon, Hool was at his desk going through Jack's phone records.
He had matched almost every number to contacts in the log book. Almost.
There was one number he couldn't place. It had called Jack twice on June 27th — once in the morning, and again at 2:07 p.m., while Jack was finishing up at the dump, just a few hours before his body ended up in a Target parking lot forty miles away.
Hool called the number. It went straight to voicemail.
He called the cell provider.
The number was registered to a man named Charlie W.
And it was a prepaid phone — bought at a convenience store, activated with cash, the kind you pick up when you specifically don't want anyone tracing calls back to your real name.
The phone had been activated on June 19th, 2005.
Eight days before Jack's murder.
Hool ran the name Charlie W. through every law enforcement database he had access to. No criminal records. No driver's license. No car registration. Nothing.
The name didn't exist.
He looked up the address written next to Charlie's name in the log book — 145 North Road. The property was registered to someone named Michael Connors.
Not Charlie.
Hool grabbed his car keys.
---
He pulled onto the gravel driveway at 145 North Road about forty-five minutes later.
It was a quiet, secluded property — a white two-story house and a large barn set back from the road, surrounded by trees. Peaceful-looking. The kind of place you wouldn't glance at twice driving past.
The middle-aged man who answered the door was composed until Hool showed his badge.
Then he became very, very nervous.
Hool asked if he was Michael Connors. The man said yes.
Hool asked if he knew a man named Jack Reed. Michael said no quickly.
Hool asked why Jack's address was in Jack's log book under the name "Charlie." Michael stammered that he didn't know.
Hool asked where Michael had been on the afternoon of June 27th.
Michael said he had spent the entire day doing repair work at a friend's lakehouse thirty miles away, and didn't get home until late that night. He gave Hool the names of several contractors who could verify it.
Hool asked if he could take a look around inside the house and outside.
Michael nodded and stepped aside.
Nothing inside the house was obviously off. No blood. No evidence of struggle.
But outside, a muddy path led toward the barn.
Hool followed it.
He opened the heavy wooden barn door and stepped inside.
The barn was immaculate.
Hay bales stacked neatly. Corners spotless. The dirt floor recently disturbed — raked or swept or scrubbed. No dust. No cobwebs in the corners.
A barn this clean, on a working farm, in the middle of summer, did not get that way on its own.
When Hool came back out, Michael was standing at the back door of the house, watching him closely.
Hool walked over to him.
He asked, as casually as he could, one final question.
"Do you know anyone named Megan Reed?"
Michael said no.
This time, the nervousness was gone. He said it flat and clean.
For the first time in the conversation, Hool believed him.
He thanked Michael and walked back to his car.
PART SIX: THE PREPAID PHONE RECORDS
That evening, Hool called every contractor whose name Michael had given him.
Every single one confirmed the alibi. Michael Connors had been at the lakehouse all day on June 27th. He had not been present when Jack Reed was killed.
But someone had been present. Someone who knew Michael well enough to use his property. Someone Michael was willing to cover for — because Michael hadn't called the police, hadn't asked questions, had simply asked that whoever used his barn leave it clean when they were done.
Megan and Walter no longer looked like the right suspects.
Something larger was in play.
Then Hool's fax machine hummed to life.
The cell provider had sent over the full call records for the prepaid phone registered to "Charlie W."
Hool pulled the sheet out and read it carefully.
The phone had been activated on June 19th and had not been used at all since the evening of Jack's murder. Every single call — incoming and outgoing — was connected to Jack's number.
Except one.
There was one call, made from that prepaid phone, to a completely different number.
Hool looked up the owner of that number.
And everything snapped into place.
PART SEVEN: THE MILLIONAIRE
The number belonged to a man named John Brooks.
John Brooks was the self-made Las Vegas millionaire that Jack Reed had moved a few years earlier. The same man Jack had looked at as a success story. The man whose path Jack wanted to follow. The destination Jack was saving up for.
Jack had admired this man.
He had viewed him as proof that someone starting from nothing could build something real.
What Jack didn't know — couldn't have known — was that John Brooks believed Jack had stolen from him during that move.
Motorcycles. Jewelry. Valuable items that Brooks was convinced had disappeared from his possessions on the day Jack's hands were on his belongings.
There was no evidence Jack took anything. No charges were ever filed. No investigation led anywhere.
But John Brooks was certain.
And he held onto it.
In the months after the move, Brooks had sent his son Jesse to Jack's property in Derry to put fear into him. That was the man Jack had spotted creeping near his trailer on that sleepless night two years before his murder — the stranger who had called out his name from the edge of the woods, who had stared at him before running when Jack came outside with a gun.
Jesse Brooks, acting on his father's instructions.
But when Jack fired a shot at him and Jesse fled, it didn't end things.
It made John Brooks angrier.
He was not a man who let things go.
And so, sometime in 2005, he put a plan together.
He reached out to Jesse. He reached out to Jesse's friend Michael Benton. He lined up two more men — Joseph Vrooman and Robin Knight. He arranged for them to use Michael Connors's barn — Connors was an old friend and business partner, and while Brooks would later testify he didn't tell him the full extent of what he was planning, Connors agreed to make the property available.
Someone bought a prepaid phone.
Paid cash.
Activated it under a fake name.
And called Jack Reed.
PART EIGHT: THE BARN
Here is what police believe happened at 145 North Road on the afternoon of June 27th, 2005.
Two of Jack's killers were already inside the house when his dump truck turned onto the gravel driveway.
One of them — the calmer one — sat still on the couch.
The other could not stop moving. Nervous energy coming off them in waves, foot tapping against the floor, hands not knowing where to rest.
The calmer one looked over and gave them a sharp look.
They stopped.
Then the doorbell rang.
The calm one got up and walked to the door while the nervous one stayed on the couch, listening.
The door opened. Voices. A greeting. The sound of boots on the porch.
Jack walked into the living room.
The nervous killer jumped to their feet and tried to look natural. They managed a few words of conversation. Nothing suspicious on the surface.
Then the group walked out the back of the house and down the muddy path toward the barn.
Two more people were waiting inside.
Jack walked through the barn door.
And before he could react to what he was seeing, the nervous killer lunged and tackled him to the ground.
Then came the sound of a hammer.
One of the others standing over them brought it down.
Once.
The nervous killer climbed to their feet and looked down at Jack. There was a gaping hole in the side of his skull. Blood was already spreading across the dirt floor.
They went outside and vomited.
When they came back in, the other three had unrolled a large sheet of plastic and were moving Jack to the center of it.
Blood was pooling fast. One of the killers said that crushing the chest would slow the bleeding. They raised the hammer and struck his chest, over and over, until the flow reduced.
Then the four of them wrapped the body, sealed the plastic, carried him out of the barn and loaded him into the back of Jack's own dump truck.
The calmer killer got in the driver's seat.
The nervous killer climbed in on the passenger side.
The other two got into the white minivan and pulled behind them.
They drove south, out of New Hampshire, across state lines into Massachusetts.
More than an hour.
When they reached Saugus, they pulled into the first large parking lot they came to.
A Target store.
They parked the truck near the back corner.
One of them checked the tarp.
Then they walked to the minivan and drove back north to clean the barn.
It had to be spotless before Michael Connors came home.
---
PART NINE: THE SENTENCES
Detective Hool had his answer.
He had the prepaid phone. He had the call records connecting it to John Brooks. He had the log book with "Charlie" scrawled on an otherwise blank page. He had the footage of two people dumping the body. He had a barn that had been scrubbed so clean it screamed guilt.
What followed was a years-long legal process.
Five men were eventually convicted in connection with the murder of Jack Reed.
John Brooks — the mastermind, the millionaire, the man who believed Jack had stolen from him and decided that deserved a death sentence — was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Robin Knight, one of the men waiting in the barn, received life as well.
Michael Benton — Jesse's friend, not the barn's owner — received thirty-three years to life.
Joseph Vrooman was sentenced to between seventeen and thirty-five years.
Jesse Brooks — John's son, the same man who had crept around Jack's property in the night two years earlier — was sentenced to fifteen to thirty years.
Jesse was released on parole in 2023.
Michael Connors, the owner of the barn, was not convicted of murder. But he had known someone was going to use his property for something. He had agreed anyway. He had said nothing afterward. He testified at trial and faced his own legal consequences for the role he played in protecting what happened on his land.
John Brooks is still in prison.
He has never expressed remorse.
He has never acknowledged that he was wrong about the theft.
As far as John Brooks is concerned, Jack Reed got what was coming to him.
CONCLUSION: THE LOG BOOK
Jack Reed was a man who scratched lottery tickets every week and never won anything big.
He kept believing the next one might be different.
He saved his money in a rented trailer behind a warehouse so that someday he could move to Las Vegas and live like the millionaire he admired.
He got out of a foster care system that had given him nothing, built a trucking business from the ground up, raised children he was proud of, and spent his whole life working toward something better.
The name "Charlie" was scrawled in his log book in a hurry because someone called him with a job opportunity and he wrote it down the way he wrote down every job — quickly, efficiently, no reason to be suspicious of a man looking for someone to clean out a barn.
He had no enemies that he knew of.
He had no idea that the man he had once looked at as a role model had decided, based on no real evidence, that Jack owed him a debt.
He had no idea the prowler in the woods two years earlier had been a warning.
He drove to 145 North Road because someone told him there was work there.
And the log book — that small, ordinary, spiral-bound work log that any contractor would carry — was the thing that kept him from disappearing without a trace.
145 North Road.
Charlie.
Eight words and a number, scrawled fast on a blank page, by a man who had no way of knowing they were the last thing he would ever write down.
Those eight words gave Detective Hool the thread he needed.
And that thread, eventually, led to a Las Vegas millionaire sitting in a prison cell in New Hampshire, serving the rest of his life for the murder of a man who had simply moved his furniture.
The lottery ticket in Jack's pocket never paid out.
But the log book did.
It just took a little longer than he would have liked.
And he wasn't there to see it.