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Murder by nature

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Murder by nature

Allow me to welcome you to the neighborhood

October 01, 2022 • Jazmin Hernandez • Season 1 • Episode 19

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Allow me to welcome you to the neighborhood.” Derek and Maria Broaddus couldn’t have been more excited to move into their dream house at 657 Boulevard in the well-to-do town of Westfield, New Jersey. But as the couple was preparing to settle into the $1.3-million house with their three children, they received this disturbing note in the mail. Signed only “The Watcher,” the letter had no return address. But whoever wrote it seemed to have been watching the Broadduses carefully.

Before the family purchased “The Watcher House” in 2014, the Broadduses was a fairly average suburban family. Maria Broaddus had grown up in Westfield, New Jersey, just blocks away from the house at 657 Boulevard. On the other hand, Derek Broaddus had grown up in Maine in a working-class family. But from his humble beginnings, he had worked his way up to a position as a senior vice-president at a Manhattan insurance company.

One night in June 2014, Derek Broaddus had just finished an evening of painting at his new home in Westfield, New Jersey, when he went outside to check the mail. A white, card-shaped envelope was addressed in thick, clunky handwriting to “The New Owner,” and the typed note inside began warmly:

Dearest new neighbor at 657 Boulevard, Allow me to welcome you to the neighborhood.

“Welcome to Murder By Nature, where we discuss True Crime, Mystery disappearances, and unsolved cases! I’m Jazmin Hernandez, your host!

Thank them for listening and being a part of this community.

Starting Oct 8th, we will be doing short videos on Youtube of our case! I am so excited to move this podcast to be on Youtube for the start of the spooky season. This month we will focus on the case that was inspired by crimes or that inspired the killers to do the crimes. Please stay tuned for our first Youtube video next Saturday!

As the new Netflix show is soon to be released, “The Watcher,” I thought we should jump into the case that sparked the show for the beginning of our spooky season.

References:

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Intro

“Welcome to Murder By Nature, where we discuss True Crime, Mystery disappearances, and unsolved cases! I’m Jazmin Hernandez, your host!

Thank them for listening and being a part of this community.

As the new Netflix show is soon to be released, “The Watcher,” I thought we should jump into the case that sparked the show for the beginning of our spooky season.

References:

Dearest new neighbor at 657 Boulevard, Allow me to welcome you to the neighborhood.

But it took a turn as Derek kept reading his new neighbor's letter. “How did you end up here?” the writer asked. “Did 657 Boulevard call to you with its force within?” The letter went on: 657 Boulevard has been the subject of my family for decades now, and as it approaches its 110th birthday, I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming. My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s, and my father watched it in the 1960s. It is now my time. Do you know the history of the house? Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard? Why are you here? I will find out.

The letter identified the Broadduses’ Honda minivan and the workers renovating the home. “I see already that you have flooded 657 Boulevard with contractors so that you can destroy the house as it was supposed to be,” “Tsk, tsk, tsk … bad move. You don’t want to make 657 Boulevard unhappy.” “You have children. I have seen them. So far, I think there are three that I have counted,” the anonymous correspondent wrote before asking if there were “more on the way”:

The envelope had no return address. “Who am I?” the person wrote. “There are hundreds and hundreds of cars that drive by 657 Boulevard each day. Maybe I am in one. Look at all the windows you can see from 657 Boulevard. Maybe I am in one. Look at any of the many windows on 657 Boulevard at all the people who stroll by each day. Maybe I am one.” The letter suggested that this message would not be the last — “Welcome my friends, welcome. Let the party begin” — followed by a signature typed in a cursive font: “The Watcher.”

It was after 10 p.m., and Derek Broaddus was alone. He raced around the house, turning off lights so no one could see inside, then called the Westfield Police Department. An officer came to the house, read the letter, and said, “What the fuck is this?” He asked Derek if he had enemies and recommended moving a piece of construction equipment from the back porch if The Watcher tried to toss it through a window.

That night, Derek and Maria wrote an email to John and Andrea Woods, the couple who sold them 657 Boulevard, to ask if they had any idea who The Watcher might be or why he or she had written, “I asked the Woods to bring me young blood and it looks like they listened.”

Andrea Woods replied the next morning: A few days before moving out, the Woodses had also received a letter from “The Watcher.” The note had been “odd,” she said and made a similar mention of The Watcher’s family observing the house over time, but Andrea said she and her husband had never received anything like it in their 23 years in the house and had thrown the letter away without much thought. That day, the Woodses went with Maria to the police station, where Detective Leonard Lugo told her not to tell anyone about the letters, including her new neighbors, most of whom she had never met — all of whom were now suspects.

The Broaddus spent the coming weeks on high alert. Derek canceled a work trip, and whenever Maria took the kids to their new house, she would yell their names if they wandered into a corner of the yard. When Derek gave a renovation tour to a couple on the block, he froze when the wife said, “It’ll be nice to have some young blood in the neighborhood.” The Broadduses’ general contractor arrived one morning to find that a heavy sign he’d hammered into the front yard had been ripped out overnight.

Two weeks after the letter arrived, Maria stopped by the house to look at some paint samples and check the mail. She recognized the thick black lettering on a card-shaped envelope and called the police. “Welcome again to your new home at 657 Boulevard,” The Watcher wrote. “The workers have been busy, and I have been watching you unload carfuls of your personal belongings. The dumpster is a nice touch. Have they found what is in the walls yet? In time they will.” The Watcher boasted of having learned much about the family in the preceding weeks, especially about their children. The letter identified the Broadduses’ three kids by birth order and by their nicknames — the ones Maria had been yelling. “I am pleased to know your names now and the name of the young blood you have brought to me,” it said. “You certainly say their names often.” The letter asked about one child in particular, whom the writer had seen using an easel inside an enclosed porch: “Is she the artist in the family?” 657 Boulevard is anxious for you to move in. It has been years and years since the young blood ruled the hallways of the house. Have you found all of the secrets it holds yet? Will the young blood play in the basement? Or are they too afraid to go down there alone? I would be very afraid if I were them. It is far away from the rest of the house. If you were upstairs, you would never hear them scream. Will they sleep in the attic? Or will you all sleep on the second floor? Who has the bedrooms facing the street? I’ll know as soon as you move in. It will help me to know who is in which bedroom. Then I can plan better. All the windows and doors in 657 Boulevard allow me to watch you and track you as you move through the house. Who am I? I am the Watcher and have been in control of 657 Boulevard for the better part of two decades now. The Woods family turned it over to you. It was their time to move on, and they kindly sold it when I asked them to. I pass by many times a day. 657 Boulevard is my job, my life, my obsession. And now you are too, Broaddus family. Welcome to the product of your greed! Greed is what brought the past three families to 657 Boulevard, and now it has brought you to me. Have a happy moving-in day. You know I will be watching.

As the letters started to grow more sinister, Derek and Maria didn't know how to proceed with the new house they thought they loved. They decided to halt their move as they grew more anxious about who could be behind these letters.

Several weeks later, a third letter arrived. “Where have you gone to?” The Watcher wrote. “657 Boulevard is missing you.”

Many Westfield residents compare their town to Mayberry, the kind of place where a new neighbor might greet you with a welcoming note. Westfield is 45 minutes from New York and a bit too slow for singles, meaning the town’s 30,000 residents are largely well-to-do families. Bloomberg ranked Westfield the 99th-richest city in America — but only the 18th wealthiest in New Jersey, and in 2014, when The Watcher struck, the website NeighborhoodScout named it the country’s 30th-safest town.

Built-in 1905, 657 Boulevard was perhaps the grandest home on the block, and when the Woodses put it on the market, they had received multiple offers above their asking price. That led the Broadduses to initially suspect that The Watcher might be someone upset over losing out on the house. But the Woodses said one interested buyer had backed out after a bad medical diagnosis, while another had already found a different home. In an email to the Broadduses, Andrea Woods proposed another theory: “Would the mention of the contractor trucks and your children suggest that it was someone in the neighborhood?”

The letters did indicate proximity. They had been processed in Kearny, the U.S. Postal Service’s distribution center in northern New Jersey. The first was posted on June 4; before the sale was public, the Woodses had never put up a for sale sign, only a day after the contractors arrived. The renovations were mostly interior, and people who lived nearby said they didn’t notice an unusual commotion, even from the jackhammering in the basement. When Derek and Maria walked Detective Lugo around the house, they showed him that the easel on the porch was hidden from the street by vegetation, making it difficult to see unless someone was behind the house or right next door.

A few days after the first letter, Maria and Derek went to a barbecue across the street, welcoming them and another new homeowner to the block. The Broaddus hadn’t told anyone about The Watcher, as the police had instructed, and found themselves scanning the party for clues while keeping tabs on their kids, who ran guilelessly through a crowd that made up much of the suspect pool.

At one point, Derek was chatting with John Schmidt, who lived two doors down, when Schmidt told him about the Langfords, who lived between them. Peggy Langford was in her 90s, and several of her adult children, all in their 60s, lived with her. The family was a bit odd, Schmidt said, but harmless. He described one of the younger Langfords, Michael, who didn’t work and had a beard like Ernest Hemingway, as “kind of a Boo Radley character.”

Derek thought the case was solved. The Langford house was right next to the easel on the porch. The family had lived there since the 1960s, when The Watcher’s father, the letters said, had begun observing 657 Boulevard. Richard Langford, the family patriarch, had died 12 years earlier, and the current Watcher claimed to have been on the job for “the better part of two decades.”

When the Broadduses told Lugo about the family, he said he already knew, and a week after the first letter arrived, he brought Michael Langford to police headquarters for an interview. Michael denied knowing anything about the letters, but the Broadduses say that Lugo told them that “the narrative” of what he said matched things mentioned in the letters. “This isn’t CSI: Westfield,” Lugo later told the Broaddus. “When the wife is dead, it’s the husband.”

But there wasn’t much hard evidence, and after a few weeks, the police chief told the Broadduses that, short of admission, there wasn’t much the department could do. “This is someone who threatened my kids, and the police are saying, ‘Probably nothing’s gonna happen,’ ” Derek said. “Probably isn’t good enough for me.” After the second letter, Derek told the cops that they would have a different kind of case if they didn’t take care of the situation. “This person attacked my family, and where I’m from, if you do that, you get your ass beat,”

Frustrated, the Broadduses began their own investigation. Derek became especially obsessed. He set up webcams in 657 Boulevard and spent nights crouched in the dark to see if anyone was watching the house at close range. The Broaddus also turned to several experts. They employed a private investigator, who staked out the neighborhood and ran background checks on the Langfords but didn’t find anything noteworthy.

Derek reached out to a former FBI agent and hired Robert Lenehan, another former FBI agent, to conduct a threat assessment. Lenehan recognized several old-fashioned tics in the letters that pointed to an older writer. The envelope was addressed to “M/M Broaddus,” the salutations included the day’s weather, and the sentences had double spaces between them. The letters had a certain literary panache, which suggested a “voracious reader” and a surprising lack of profanity given the level of anger, which Lenehan thought meant a “less macho” writer.

Lenehan didn’t think The Watcher would likely act on the threats, but the letters had enough typos and errors to imply a certain erraticism. (The first letter was dated “Tuesday, June 4th,” but that day was a Wednesday.) There was also a “seething anger” directed at the wealthy in particular. The Watcher was upset by new money moving into town. Lenehan recommended looking into former housekeepers or their descendants. Perhaps The Watcher was jealous that the Broadduses had bought a home the writer couldn’t afford.

But the focus remained on the Langfords. In cooperation with Westfield police, the Broadduses sent a letter to the Langfords announcing plans to tear down the house, hoping to prompt a response. (Nothing happened.) Detective Lugo brought Michael Langford in for a second interview but got nowhere, and his sister, Abby, accused the police of harassing their family. Eventually, the Broadduses hired Lee Levitt, a lawyer, who met with several members of the Langford family and their attorney to show them the letters, along with photos explaining how their home was one of the few vantage points from which the easel could be seen. The meeting grew tense, and the Langfords insisted Michael was innocent.

There were reasons to consider other suspects. For one thing, the police spoke to Michael before the second letter was sent, which would make sending two more especially reckless. (The Broadduses say that Lugo told them they wouldn’t receive any more letters after he spoke to Michael.) Then there was the rest of the neighborhood to consider. The private investigator found two child sex offenders within a few blocks. Bill Woodward, the Broadduses’ housepainter, had also noticed something strange. The couple behind 657 Boulevard kept a pair of lawn chairs strangely close to the Broadduses’ property. “One day, I was looking out the window, and I saw this older guy sitting in one of the chairs,” Woodward told me. “He wasn’t facing his house — he was facing the Broadduses.’ ”

But by the end of 2014, the investigation had stalled. The Watcher had left no digital trail, fingerprints, and no way to place someone at the scene of a crime that could have been hatched from pretty much any mailbox in northern New Jersey. The letters could be read closely for possible clues or dismissed as the nonsensical ramblings of a sociopath. “It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” said Scott Kraus, who helped investigate the case for the Union County Prosecutor’s Office. In December, the Westfield police told the Broadduses they had run out of options.

The renovations to 657 Boulevard were finished within a few months, and the family had to decide if they would move into a house they once loved. Derek priced out trained German shepherds and posted a job on a website for military veterans “All you have to do is work out in the backyard every day,” but the Broadduses hadn’t bought 657 to feel bunkered in a fortress. Derek had been responding to occasional alarms at the house, sometimes in the middle of the night, bringing a knife with him just in case. Bill Woodward, the painter, said. “I’m a stranger, and Maria was crying and shaking in my arms.” It didn’t help that The Watcher seemed to be getting more and more unhinged:

657 Boulevard is turning on me. It is coming after me. I don’t understand why. What spell did you cast on it? It used to be my friend, and now it is my enemy. I am in charge of 657 Boulevard. It is not in charge of me. I will fend off its bad things and wait for it to become good again. It will not punish me. I will rise again. I will be patient and wait for this to pass and for you to bring the young blood back to me. 657 Boulevard needs young blood. It needs you. Come back. Let the young blood play again like I once did. Let the young blood sleep in 657 Boulevard. Stop changing it and let it alone.

The Broaddus sold their old home and moved in with Maria’s parents while continuing to pay the mortgage and property taxes on 657 Boulevard. They told only a handful of friends about the letters, which left others to ask why they weren’t moving in. “Legal issues,” they said. They fought constantly and started taking medication to fall asleep. “I was a depressed wreck,” Derek said. Maria decided to see a therapist after a routine doctor’s visit that began with the question “How are you?” which caused her to burst into tears. The therapist said she suffered from post-traumatic stress that wouldn’t disappear until they removed the house.

Six months after the letters arrived, the Broadduses decided to sell 657 Boulevard. They initially listed it for more than they paid to reflect their renovations. But few worlds are more gossipy than suburban New Jersey real estate, and rumors had already begun to swirl about why the house sat empty. One broker emailed to say her client “loved” it but that “there are so many unsubstantiated rumors flying around,” ranging “from sexual predator to stalker,” that they needed to know more. The Broaddus sent a partial disclosure mentioning the letters to interested buyers and told Coldwell Banker, their Realtor, that they intended to show the full letters to anyone whose offer was accepted. Several preliminary bids came in well below the asking price, but the Broadduses weren’t ready to take such a financial hit and only wanted to share the letters with likely buyers. No one got that far, even after they lowered the price. A Coldwell agent who hadn’t read the letters told them in an email that they were being unnecessarily forthcoming “My friend got horrible, threatening letters about her dog barking, and she didn’t think to disclose,” but the Broadduses insisted. “I don’t know how you live through what we did and think you could do it to somebody else,” Derek said.

Derek and Maria thought about what they would have done had the previous owners told them about their letter from The Watcher. The Woodses, both retired scientists, told the Broadduses that they remembered the letter they received as more strange than threatening, thanking them for taking care of the house. They say they never had any issues. “We certainly never felt ‘watched,’ ” Andrea told them. They rarely even locked the doors.

But the Broadduses felt the name alone was ominous enough to merit mentioning to a new family moving in, and on June 2, 2015, a year after buying 657 Boulevard, they filed a legal complaint against the Woodses, arguing that the Woodses should have disclosed the letter just as they had the fact that water sometimes got in the basement. The Broaddus said they hoped to reach a quiet settlement. Their kids still didn’t know about The Watcher, and their lawyer assured them that, at most, a small legal newswire might pick up the story.

A local reporter had found the complaint, which included snippets of The Watcher’s menacing threats, and after a belated attempt by the Broadduses to seal it, the story went viral. News trucks camped out at 657 Boulevard, and one local reporter set up a lawn chair to conduct his own watch. The Broadduses got more than 300 media requests, but with advice from a crisis-management consultant referred by one of Derek’s colleagues, they decided not to speak publicly to spare their kids even more attention. They vacated Westfield and went to a friend’s beach house. Eventually, Derek and Maria sat down with their children to explain why they hadn’t moved into their home. The kids had plenty of questions Who is The Watcher? Where does this person live? Why is this person angry with us? to which Derek and Maria had few answers.

From a safer distance, The Watcher was a real-life mystery to solve. A commenter suggested ground-penetrating radar to find whatever The Watcher claimed was in the walls. (The home inspector had already looked and told Derek the only issue was the aging home’s lack of insulation.) A group of Reddit users obsessed over Google Maps’ Street View, which showed a car parked in front of 657 that one user thought had “a man holding a camera in the driver’s seat.” The range of proposed suspects included a jilted mistress, a spurned Realtor, a local high-schoolers creative-writing project, guerrilla marketing for a horror movie, and “mall goths having fun.” Some people just thought the Broadduses were wimps for not moving in. “I would NEVER let this sicko stop me from moving into a house. Never back down from a TERRORIST,” which irked the Broaddus. “None of them have read the letters or had their children threatened by someone they didn’t know,” Derek said. “To decide whether this person’s only nuts enough to write these letters and not to do something, what if something did happen?

In Westfield, people were on edge. Laurie Clancy, who teaches piano lessons in her house behind 657 Boulevard, stated one of her students came for a lesson shortly after news of The Watcher broke and started bawling. “She was terrified to walk down the Boulevard,” Clancy said. At the first Westfield town-council meeting after the letters became public, Mayor Andy Skibitksy assured the public that The Watcher hadn’t been heard from in a year and that even though the police hadn’t solved the case, their investigation had been “exhaustive.”

This was news to 657’s neighbors, who had never heard from the cops. “We are confounded as to how a thorough investigation can be conducted without talking to all the neighbors with proximity to the home,” several of them wrote in a letter to the local paper. Under the glare of national attention, Barron Chambliss, a veteran detective in the Westfield police, was asked to look at the case. “The Broadduses are victims, and I don’t think they got the support they needed,”.

Chambliss knew his colleagues had looked closely at Michael Langford. According to his brother Sandy Langford, Michael had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young man. He sometimes spooked newcomers to the neighborhood when he did strange things, like a walk through their backyard or peeking into the windows of homes that were being renovated. But those who knew him told me that the odd things he did were mostly unusual neighborly kindnesses. “He goes out and gets the newspapers for me every morning,” said John Schmidt, who lives next door. People who had known Michael for decades told me they didn’t think he could write the letters.

As Chambliss looked into the case, he discovered something surprising: Investigators had eventually conducted a DNA analysis on one of the envelopes and determined that the DNA belonged to a woman. Chambliss decided to look more closely at Abby Langford, Michael’s sister, who worked as a real estate agent. Was she upset about missing a commission right next door? She also worked at the local Lord & Taylor, and Chambliss coordinated with a security guard to nab her plastic water bottle during a shift. But Chambliss says the DNA sample was not a match. Not long after, the prosecutor’s office gave Derek and Maria some unexpected news: They wouldn’t say why or how, but they had ruled out the Langfords as suspects.

The Broadduses were stunned. They had recently told the prosecutors that they planned to file civil charges against the Langfords and wondered if the prosecutors were lying to prevent the story from blowing up again. “My family moved to the Boulevard in 1961, and we never caused a problem for anybody,” Sandy Langford stated. “This guy gets all these letters, and all of a sudden, people are pointing fingers.”

Left without a suspect, the Broadduses reopened their personal investigation. They were still coy about sharing too much with their neighbors, who remained in the pool of suspects, but spent an afternoon walking the block with a picture of The Watcher’s handwritten envelope. They hoped someone might recognize the writing from a Christmas card, but the only notable encounter came when an older man who lived behind 657 said his son joked that The Watcher sounded a little bit like him. A neighbor across the street was the CEO of Kroll, the security firm, and the Broadduses hired the company to look for handwriting matches, but they found nothing. They also hired Robert Leonard, a renowned forensic linguist who didn’t find any noteworthy overlap when he scoured local online forums for similarities to The Watcher’s writing.

Chambliss and the Westfield police were also back at square one. The cops asked Andrea Woods for a DNA sample and interviewed her 21-year-old son, who was surprised to find that he suddenly seemed to be a suspect. A year after the fact, it was hard to find fresh leads, and the initial police canvas had been so porous that it had missed a significant clue: Around the same time that the Broadduses had received their first letter, another family on the Boulevard got a similar note from The Watcher. The parents of that family had lived in their house for years, and their kids were grown, so they threw the letter away just as the Woodses had. But after the news broke, one of their children posted about it on Facebook, then deleted the post. When investigators spoke to the family, they confirmed that the letter had been similar to the Broadduses’. But its existence only made the case more confusing. “There wasn’t a lot to go on,” Chambliss stated

One night, Chambliss and a partner were sitting in the back of a van parked on Boulevard, watching the house through a pair of binoculars. Around 11 p.m., a car stopped in front of the house long enough for Chambliss to grow suspicious. He says he traced the car to a young woman in a nearby town whose boyfriend lived on the same block as 657. The woman told Chambliss her boyfriend was into “some really dark video games,” including, in Chambliss’s memory, one in which he was playing as a specific character: “The Watcher.” As for the female DNA, Chambliss figured the girlfriend, or someone else, could have helped. The boyfriend was living elsewhere at the time, but Chambliss says he agreed to come in for an interview on two separate occasions. He didn’t show up either time. Chambliss didn’t have enough evidence to compel him to appear, and with the media attention dying down, he dropped the case and moved on.

The theory, so far as it went, was that the Broadduses had suffered buyer’s remorse or realized they couldn’t afford the home and concocted an elaborate scheme to get out of the sale. Or Derek was cooking up some kind of insurance fraud. Or they were angling for a movie deal. Some locals found it noteworthy that over the course of a decade, the Broadduses had upgraded from a $315,000 house to a $770,000 house to a $1.3 million one and refinanced their mortgages. A few weeks after the letters became public, the Westfield Leader published an article in which anonymous neighbors were quoted asking why the Broadduses kept renovating a home they weren’t moving into or questioning whether they had really done that much renovating at all. The Leader even cast doubt on Maria’s commitment to her family’s safety, citing evidence that she had a public Facebook page with photos of her kids. The paper did note that the police had tested Maria’s DNA, which didn’t match.

None of the theories made much logical sense. The Broaddus had answers to every question. “How does someone go from a $300,000 house to a $1.3 million house in ten years?” Derek stated. “It’s America!” But they weren’t speaking publicly, and the rumors persisted. One Boulevard resident wrote a letter to the editor arguing that “an elaborate scheme is underway to defraud the Woods family for millions of dollars.”

The Broaddus hadn’t known how their neighbors would react to news about The Watcher, but they had lived in the area for a decade, and Maria’s family had been a part of the community for much longer, so it was shocking to find themselves accused of being con artists. To Derek, it seemed that some in Westfield preferred the conspiracy theory to consider whether their town might be home to a menace.

While Maria looks back fondly on her childhood, she was born a few years after Westfield resident John List infamously murdered his wife, mother, and three children in their home, and remembers a period when she and other kids were warned to look out for a strange van driving around town. “My mother always told me don’t have a false sense of security,” she said. “It wasn’t that bad things were going on all the time, it was that bad things happen everywhere. She didn’t want me to think that this is Mayberry.”

The Broadduses were suddenly outcasts not only from their home but also their town. Derek wanted to leave Westfield, but Maria insisted on not uprooting her kids. “This person took so much from us,” “I wouldn’t let them take more.” Two years after The Watcher’s letters arrived, the Broadduses borrowed money from family members to buy a second home in Westfield, using an LLC to keep the location private. But staying in town was stressful. The first time Maria let her daughter go to the pool with friends, she stared at the tracker on her daughter’s iPhone the whole time. One of their kids was in language-arts class when the teacher led a debate about whether the family in a book they were reading should move to Westfield. The class thought they should, partly because of how safe it was. Afterward, one of the kids told the Broadduses’ child, “My parents told me that no matter what your family says, Westfield is safe.”

In the spring of 2016, they put 657 back on the market, hoping it might garner more interest given how many people had reacted to the letters by saying they would have ignored them and just moved in. The Broaddus held a well-attended open house, after which Derek and Maria spent hours researching every person who signed in and comparing their handwriting to The Watcher’s, but each time a potential buyer expressed interest and met with the Broadduses’ lawyer to read the letters, they backed out. “Some cocky guy from Staten Island said, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna get a house at a discount,’ ” Derek recalled. “He reads the letters, and we never hear from him again.”

Feeling as if they were out of options, the Broadduses’ real-estate lawyer proposed an idea: Sell the house to a developer, who could tear it down and split the property into two sellable homes. They thought they could get $1 million for the lot. Subdivisions like this had become common in Westfield, much to the chagrin of many locals, and 657 was one of the neighborhood’s largest lots. Even so, dividing it would require the Westfield Planning Board to grant an exception: The two smaller lots would be 67.4 and 67.6 feet wide — just shy of the mandated 70 feet.

When the planning board met to decide the application in January 2017, it had already devoted a three-hour hearing to the issue. More than 100 residents showed up. One of them, who lived across the street and had a daughter in the same grade as one of the Broadduses’ kids, had retained a lawyer to fight the proposal. James Foerst, the Broadduses’ attorney, explained that the three-foot exemption was as narrow as the easel he was using to display a map of the neighborhood — a map that showed several lots on the block that were also too small. The neighbors expressed concern that the plan might require knocking down trees and that the new homes would have aesthetically unpleasing front-facing garages. Foerst repeatedly threatened the halfway house as a possible alternative.

After the lawyers, a parade of neighbors stood to speak. Glen Dumont, from across the street, said the proposal “would spell the end of the 600 block of Boulevard as we know it.” A woman whose kids had been to the Broadduses’ old home for a birthday party spoke on behalf of nine neighbors and presented 657 Boulevard as Westfield’s Alamo. “Our neighborhoods are constantly under attack from turf, lights, parking decks, you name it,” she said. “If we can’t make a stand on Boulevard, where can we?” At one point, Abby Langford stood up to say she had “spent almost 60 years looking at a magnificent, beautiful house” and didn’t “want to be looking out at a driveway.”

The hearing lasted four hours, during which there was little discussion of the reason the Broadduses had been driven to tear down their dream home in the first place. “Has anybody thought about whether or not this lunatic who did this has been apprehended?” said Tom Higgins, who lived across the street, toward the end of the hearing. Even so, Higgins pointed out that there was no guarantee The Watcher wouldn’t send letters to the two new houses and argued that aesthetics should rule the day. “Putting up two houses there is gonna stick out like an old client of mine in Texas told me,” Higgins said. “It’s gonna stick out like a dog’s balls.” While some of the neighbors expressed compassion, their focus remained on what the Broadduses stood to gain financially — and what they themselves might lose.

At 11:30 p.m., the board unanimously rejected the proposal. Derek and Maria were distraught. On top of the mortgage and renovations, they have paid around $100,000 in Westfield property taxes. The town denied their request for relief and spent at least that amount investigating The Watcher and exploring ways to deal with the home, not to mention cleaning the gutters. The Broaddus recognized that 657 Boulevard was a beautiful house on a beautiful street that was worth maintaining but were surprised their neighbors didn’t see the uniqueness of the situation. The Watcher had expressed a desire to protect the Boulevard from change; instead, it had been torn apart.

Not long after the planning board’s decision, the Broadduses got some good news. A family with grown children and two big dogs had agreed to rent 657 Boulevard. The renter told the Star-Ledger he wasn’t worried about The Watcher, though he had a clause in the lease that let him out in case of another letter.

Two weeks later, Derek went to 657 to deal with squirrels that had taken up residence on the roof. The renter handed him an envelope that had just arrived:

Violent winds and bitter cold To the vile and spiteful Derek and his wench of a wife, Maria, This letter came out of nowhere two and a half years after The Watcher appeared. It was dated February 13, the day the Broadduses gave depositions in their lawsuit against the Woodses. “You wonder who The Watcher is? Turn around idiots,” the letter read. “Maybe you even spoke to me, one of the so-called neighbors who has no idea who The Watcher could be. Or maybe you do know and are too scared to tell anyone. Good move.” The letter was less stylish and more wrathful than the others, and it seemed the writer had been closely following the story. They had seen the media coverage “I walked by the news trucks when they took over my neighborhood and mocked me,” “I watched as you watched from the dark house in an attempt to find me. Telescopes and binoculars are wonderful inventions”, and the attempt to tear down the house. “657 Boulevard survived your attempted assault and stood strong with its army of supporters barricading its gates,” the letter read. “My soldiers of the Boulevard followed my orders to a T. They carried out their mission and saved the soul of 657 Boulevard with my orders. All hail The Watcher!!!” The letter indicated revenge could come in many forms:

Maybe a car accident. Maybe a fire. Maybe something as simple as a mild illness that never seems to go away but makes you feel sick day after day after day after day after day. Maybe the mysterious death of a pet. Loved ones suddenly die. Planes and cars and bicycles crash. Bones break. The renter was spooked but agreed to stay if the Broadduses installed cameras around the house, and

Derek took the letter to police headquarters, where a detective looked at a neighborhood map and traced a circle around the house 300 yards in diameter, suggesting The Watcher must be somewhere in there. Derek drew one much closer. “In my view, it’s one of ten houses in the world,” he said.

They have a new tenant at 657, but the rent doesn’t cover the mortgage. Their kids are occasionally teased at school. And the conspiratorial rumors persist.

The Watcher was no longer the only person sending anonymous letters in Westfield. Last Christmas Eve, several families received an envelope in their mailboxes. They’d been delivered by hand to the homes of people who had been the most vocal in criticizing the Broadduses online. It included several stories about recent acts of domestic terrorism in which signs of brewing mental illness had gone unnoticed. The typed letters were signed, “Friends of the Broaddus Family.” The people who received the letters didn’t know who had sent them, but the tone was familiar. The author from the cut asked Derek Broaddus whether he had written them; He admitted he did, and He wasn’t proud of it. He hadn’t even told his wife and said they were the only anonymous letters he’d written. But he had felt driven to his wit’s end, fed up with watching silently as people threw accusations at his family based on practically nothing.

The fourth letter showed up and read. “You are despised by the house,” it read. “And The Watcher won.”

In June of 2019, the Broaddus sold the house on 657 Boulevard for $959,000.

My Thoughts

Outro

That brings us to the end of this episode! As always, thanks for listening to Murder By Nature. If you enjoy our show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any streaming platform you are currently on, and be sure to come back Saturday for our new episode. Until then, I am your host, Jazmin Hernandez, don’t forget to stay safe! Don’t get murdered or murder people, you lovely humans!

People on this episode

Jazmin Hernandez

Host