Blink
Written by Beth LeeI felt immediate reprieve from the heat as a wave of cold air hit me before I even stepped through the door into the District 7 police precinct. I got a quick glimpse of a reflection of myself in the glass door. My brown roots were too long, and my wet-from-the-humidity shoulder-length hair was thrown into a pony barely held up with a scrunchie. I saw the dark circles under my eyes, even though I’d put makeup on that morning before work. I looked like I’d been out walking in a rainstorm.
It was unseasonably warm, even for September, as if summer forgot it was over. As it closed, I let the door lean up against my back, sweaty from the block and a half walk where I parked on the street.
There were two men sitting in dark-colored fabric covered chairs that looked comfortable, despite the starkness of the waiting area. It was quiet, and I could hear the low buzzing of the overhead fluorescent lighting, though just feet behind me was one of the busiest
I walked up to the chest-high desk and found myself talking to a woman into a hole in the plexiglass. She gave me a long, unimpressed look when I hesitated to tell her why I was there. After a long pause, she spoke.
“You think you recorded a murder?” The way she punched the word think made me question myself. Unsure how to respond, I shrugged and looked down.
“Name?”
“Angela Collins.”
“Ok.” She pointed to the chairs. “Sit.”
I chose the chair against a window, but furthest from the men already waiting. The evening sun was hot against my back and I began sweating again. There were shades, but I wasn’t sure if I could pull them, and I didn’t want to ask the lady. Instead, I dozed off.
I was startled awake hearing a door buzz and a wiry middle-aged man in a brown suit and beige tie asked, “Collins? Angela?” and pointed at me. I wiped a bit of drool off the corner of my mouth and nodded, noticing the other two men were no longer there. The detective had no expression on his face, as if it was perfectly normal for people to fall asleep in the waiting room. Maybe it was. He waved me though the door, letting it slam behind us, ensuring our safety from the outside world.
I followed him behind a second door into a large space with multiple desks. He pointed to a wooden chair next to his desk, facing his office chair. The room was loud, with many officers talking in differing tones and levels. I think they called it the bullpen on one of the tv cop shows I used to watch. It smelled like stale coffee.
“I’m Detective Wenchel. What can I help you with today?” he asked matter-of-factly as he straightened some files on his desk. I had to take a second glance at the files, surprised they were even used anymore. Several other men in suits, probably detectives, looked over at me, sometimes leaning in to listen. I presumed that Detective Wenchel drew the short straw, but they were interested in what I had to say.
While driving from my house to the precinct, I planned exactly what I was going to say. My plan was to smartly engage the officer’s critical thinking skills to explain what it was I actually caught on camera.
Instead of using the sound reasoning in my head, I replied quietly, “I think my Blink camera recorded a murder.” I shrugged again.
He continued fussing with his files, looking down when I said it. For the briefest moment, he looked up and straight ahead. Then, he looked directly at me, studying my face for a moment. I saw a smile cross his eyes, but not his face. He was actually rather handsome, although he was at least twenty years older than my thirty years.
“Okayyyyy,” he said. “Can I see the recording?”
I opened the app on my phone, but I couldn’t pull it up. I tried to connect to the Wi-Fi, but my phone refused.
“Why don’t you describe the recording to me, Miss Collins,” he said, seemingly without judgement. I told him everything, about Derby Man, as I’d come to call him in my head, and Bald Man. I cried, resisting an urge to run out of the building. The detective handed me one Kleenex, and then another. I wondered if he was normally a patient man or it’s something he learned on the job. I think I heard a detective behind me snicker.
Once I was done crying, I apologized.
“Why are you apologizing?” He asked.
I didn’t know, actually. “I don’t know. For wasting your time. I’m so tired. Recently, I haven’t been sleeping.”
“You haven’t wasted my time. You told me what you saw on the recording. What was the date your camera recorded this . . . incident?” he said.
“The actual murder? Two nights ago. At 3:08 AM. They were all at 3:08.”
“All? What do you mean all?”
He still hadn’t written anything down, so I half expected him to stand up and walk me back out to the front.
“There were several recordings of the man, both men really, before the murder.”
“Why don’t you go ahead and send all of the recordings to me when you get home. We haven’t had an unsolved murder in our district since early February,” he said and stood up, indicating our meeting was over.
“Sure, Yeah. But that’s the weird part.” I hesitated and he didn’t speak. “It doesn’t look like it was filmed in front of my house.” I didn’t mention that the blood squirting from Bald Man looked fake. He could make his own judgement when he reviewed it.
He looked behind me and nodded, likely responding to a detective behind him rolling his eyes at what I’d just said. Nonetheless, he ushered me out, handing me his card with information to send the recordings on the back.
Once home, I sent the recordings, but wasn’t surprised when I didn’t hear back. Then, I ate cereal for dinner and laid in bed without brushing my teeth or removing my makeup. For the first time in months, I slept through the night.
Six months prior, I pulled my gray Nissan Rogue into Milwaukee’s Golden Valley neighborhood and fell in love immediately. At the time I was living in a nondescript apartment building on the east side, two blocks from a busy road filled with bars and restaurants. I liked the location, but it felt crowded. Here, each house was different from the next, each with its own personality. It felt cozy and safe.
Between the streets and the homes, there were swaths of green space with mature trees that towered over the one-story homes. In the late 1940s, the city planted Elm trees and today they loomed large over the neighborhood, offering a bit of privacy from the street and the repetition of lush greenery in summer and falling leaves in fall, with a bit of both in between.
It was a rainy period in early spring, and the trees had already begun their regrowth after the cold and snowy winter months of Wisconsin. I noticed yellow daffodils springing to life underneath the bay window of the house for sale. It was early for perennials; they were eager to awaken from their winter slumber.
As a kid, there was a storybook I loved to read. I don’t remember the story itself, as that was a distant memory; but an old lady named Grandma Gertie owned a house where she baked cookies and entertained her family by playing piano. As soon as I pulled up, I thought of the house in that book, and felt an instant connection.
Unlike the cream city brick houses in Milwaukee are known for, this one was a reddish-brown Canadian stout brick, according to the real estate agent. The second story loft and steeply pitched gabled roof with an overhang technically made it a cape cod. Unlike the daffodils, which seemed to be easily popping out of the ground, the grass fought to turn green.
A concrete path meandered from the front sidewalk and split into two at the corner of the house. In one direction, it went to the front door, and the other, to the detached garage in the back yard, facing the alley that runs north-south through each block in the neighborhood.
With only a fifteen-minute drive to my office downtown, and a large down payment that made payments cheaper than my current rent, I put in an offer and it was accepted.
It was a sunny Friday in late April when I moved in. The air was cool at night, but I already felt spring turning into summer during the daytime. As I unpacked my belongings, I opened windows throughout the house, reminding myself to close them before nightfall. I was too far from Lake Michigan to experience the famous “cooler by the lake” weather, but spring always brought unpredictable chills anywhere in the city.
As I stepped out of the shower, I heard a knock on the front door. I dressed quickly, expecting whoever it was to leave before I opened the door. To my surprise, a middle-aged women stood before me, smiling.
“Hello, I’m Sharon,” she greeted me warmly with a gruff voice, holding a plate for me. “I brought you cookies.”
I introduced myself and invited her in, but she declined. I took the plate of cookies and noticed the smell of cigarette smoke radiating from Sharon.
“I have to go pick up my grandkids. I tried to ring the doorbell, but I don’t think it’s working,” she said, waving goodbye and retreating down the stairs. I watched her walk across the street and looked at the doorbell. It looked to be a Blink camera.
I downloaded an app for the doorbell and set up an account. The neighborhood was mostly safe, but a bit of extra security will give me some sense of peace, and I could see if anyone came to my home when I wasn’t there.
Feeling safe, tired and satisfied with my decision to move to this house, I fell asleep in my new bedroom before the sun set.
Two weeks later, as the weather became warmer and daytime light lingered longer, I fell into a routine of working in the office three days a week and from home two. As I lived alone, the extra bedroom in my house gave me a home office that faced onto my small patio out back.
As an accountant, I enjoyed the order of things. At work I made numbers fit into columns and worked into a necessary balance. At home, I continued to unpack, placing each item I owned in the right spot. The house itself wasn’t larger than my last apartment, so everything fit nicely.
One morning in late May, I awoke, as I normally did, fifteen minutes before my alarm went off. I got up at the same time each weekday morning whether I drove to the office or not. I often took coffee out to my patio and sat on my new brown wicker furniture in the mornings. The sun hadn’t reached it yet, but the heat outside made for a pleasant situation. The robins were back from their winter migration, and I could hear their celebratory songs. I imagined they were looking for their friends and planning a get together.
It wasn’t until I was going to open my phone to read some celebrity gossip in Daily News online that I realized there was a Blink notification from 3:08 AM. Dog poop mysteriously appeared in my yard several times since I moved in, and I thought maybe I’d catch the dog and its owner on camera.
Instead, I saw a fog. It was kind of unusual, just hanging in the air, seemingly defying the laws of physics. I was reminded of a game I played on my phone, where I had to press 15 times to clear the “fog” in the scene. I decided it was just a fluke of the camera at night.
Strangely, over time, the fog disappeared. I’d wake up every four nights or so to find the Blink notifications at 3:08, and one area of the fog disappeared, until it was clear, though it was too dark to see much else. I was bemused, not knowing what I was seeing. I once asked Sharon about it, but she didn’t have a doorbell camera, explaining they were too fussy for her.
Two weeks later, in early June, I opened my eyes, anticipating a notification on my phone, as they began to appear regularly, about every four nights. The recording was clear, and there was now a slight glow from the streetlight just out of view. I still wasn’t able to see clearly beyond the dim light. I watched the recording for the full fifteen seconds and nothing appeared. I bit my lower lip slightly and watched again. Nothing. It must be a malfunction. Smelling the freshly made coffee emanating from my kitchen, I grabbed my bathrobe and went to pour a cup.
Once the summer heat kicked in, the recording showed movement just out of view. Was what I saw a shadow of someone? Was it just the shadow of a tree because of the wind? I didn’t notice any wind, and I heard only the vague humming of ambient noise and some crickets. I the movement was probably just someone walking their dog and for whatever reason, chose to turn back the direction they came just outside of view.
The next time a notification appeared, I saw the figure of a man wearing a dark overcoat and a derby hat walking down the sidewalk. His arms were behind his back, and he was slightly hunched over. The walk was deliberate – neither slow nor fast. He was facing down, as if trying to see what was on the ground in front of him. He never looked up. Though his clothing seemed more than someone who would be out walking in the middle of the night in summertime. I looked up into the corner of the room and put two fingers over my mouth. He didn’t approach the house, so I convinced myself not to worry about the unusual man.
I gasped aloud when I played a recording one Sunday morning in July, after a night out. I slept longer than normal, fighting off a headache and nausea, the effects from too many martinis and eating only a salad for dinner. I grabbed my phone to check out how much I spent on Ubers, fighting the urge not to throw up on my floor.
The man in the derby walked into the middle of the recording, as usual. I had begun to leave the light on the front door on, so I was able to see him fairly clearly, though I couldn’t see beyond him into the road. In this recording, the man in the derby stopped and turned toward my house, his face expressionless. He lingered, standing akimbo. I could see he had sharp features, a long nose and jutted chin.
I shot out of bed and paced my small bedroom. I watched the 30-second recording over and over, trying to make sense of it for that entire Sunday.
My hands shook when I realized the Uber dropped me off at 2:49 AM. The man was recorded at 3:08.
Two more recordings followed before a second man appeared. He was bald, so I began thinking of the two as Derby Man and Bald Man. In his first recording, Bald Man looked at my home, smiling, though his body language didn’t convey a man who was playful. I had no context to understand why he acknowledged my home. When the second video began, Bald Man was already facing my home, as if he appeared from nowhere. Again, he was smiling. His face was rounder than Derby Man. His eyes were shadowed out, as if they were sunken in.
Both times I felt my hands shaking and a warmth washed over me. I looked around my bedroom, not knowing how to respond. I think my brain stopped thinking for a moment, but my hangover overrode the fear, and I gave in to my hangover and laid back down. When I awoke hours later, I cancelled the Blink service, deciding not knowing what was lingering in my neighborhood in the night made the most sense. I didn’t get a notification for a month.
In mid-August, I received a notification at 3:08 on a Tuesday morning. The light emanating from my porch seemed to get brighter with time, though I still couldn’t make out actual images such as the house across the street, or even a car parked in the street. I tried to change the settings, but I still wasn’t able to see more.
Bald Man was already in the middle of the screen, with his back to the camera. As usual, he wore dark clothing. He wore pants and black shoes, but I could see his arms, because he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. I could see what looked to be a tattoo on his right forearm but couldn’t make out what it was. Unlike other videos with ambient sound, there was no sound at all. I checked to see if it was on mute, but it was not. The Blink camera simply had not recorded any sound.
Derby Man walked into view and grabbed Bald Man from behind, towering over him. I noticed derby man’s arms for the first time. It must have been shadows and darkness, but they were long and thin, almost too long for a man.
The recording ended, but one more nearly identical recording came through. The only difference was that Bald Man looked sideways, as he noticed Derby Man walking towards him at the beginning of the recording. I noticed the smile literally drop off of Bald Man’s face, and his shoulders dropped. Again, there was no sound.
It was nearing the end of August when I finally saw what Derby Man did to Bald Man. Derby Man grabbed Bald Man from behind, putting his right arm around Bald Man’s throat. Derby Man walked backwards just out of view of the camera, dragging Bald Man. I could still see Bald Man’s legs. They were moving, but his arms appeared to go limp.
Bald Man suddenly lunged forward, and both men re-entered the screen. Derby Man fought him a bit, but he still had Bald Man by the throat. Now both facing my house, Derby Man briefly stopped and smirked at the camera, almost as if he paused the action around him. Bald Man appeared to faint, possibly overcome from being choked. I could hear my own heart beating as I watched.
And then, suddenly from out of nowhere, Derby Man held a long knife that reflected from a streetlight. I’d never seen a knife so long before. Derby Man looked directly at the Blink camera and plunged it into the side of Bald Man’s neck. Blood squirted out of Bald Man sideways, seemingly defying gravity. It looked like a movie scene, rather than real life. The blood from Bald Man shot out of his neck perpendicular to his body. It was bright red, as if it was photoshopped to look more real. Bald Man dropped to the ground and Derby Man sneered momentarily at the camera before walking off in the opposite direction he came.
And that’s when I noticed it for the first time. Previously, I couldn’t see Sharon’s small ranch house across the street, but when I looked closely at the recording, I noticed that it was not Sharon’s house across the street. The house in the recording was a large two-story home with cedar siding.
I debated reporting what I’d seen, and finally decided to go to the police station.
I didn’t sleep at all in the nights after I witnessed what I thought was a murder, and before I walked into District 7. In fact, I sat on my couch and watched outside from 3 AM to 3:30 AM each night. Sitting high on my knees, facing backwards against the couch, I peeked out between a very small slit in the blinds in my living room. I felt like a final girl, staring out, listening my shallow breathing, waiting for a murderer to return. Finally, I was too exhausted to stay awake, and my knees hurt from sitting upright on them. I cried myself to sleep, which I hadn’t done since I was eighteen and ghosted by someone I crushed on in college.
Some weeks after meeting with Detective Wenchel, I was able to sleep more than six hours at a time. And when I woke, I began looking for notifications of a different sort – from a man named Tom I’d met at a party and began dating.
It was nearly a year after I walked into District 7 when Detective Wenchel called and asked me to come into the station. At this point, I was exclusively dating Tom and spending about half the week at his house in Wauwatosa. He’d spent some time at my house, as well, but always had to go home to tend to his dog, Oscar. The recordings felt as if they’d occurred a lifetime ago, rather than twelve months.
When I arrived, Detective Wenchel was waiting for me. He smiled at me and waved me back to follow him. His desk was the same. Before I sat down, I noticed he had pictures on his desk.
“Kids?” I asked and pointed to the little girl, smiling.
He surprised me by laughing.
“Grandkids. Two girls. One is nine and the other eleven. They like gymnastics,” he said.
“Oh, that’s nice,” I said, not knowing how to respond to that detail.
“You look well rested,” he said. I assumed he was referring to looking as tired as I felt when I was in last.
He moved his computer monitor to face me.
“I’ll be blunt with you. When you sent me the recordings, I thought you might be playing some sort of game with us, but I couldn’t figure out why.”
I shook my head. “What do you mean?”
“The recordings were weird. That man in the derby looking directly at the camera. The blood squirting. It was unusual, to say the least. Why would anyone do that unless it was a joke or scam?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t worry, you’re not in any trouble. In fact . . . Well, I’ll just show you,” he said and showed me two pictures of men, side by side.
They were undoubtably the men in the recording. Derby Man wasn’t wearing his lid, but I recognized his sharp features. Bald Man looked younger than the recording, but it was him.
“That’s the men,” I said, confused and shocked.
“Yes. The man on the right is Eric Braden. He’s a sixty-year-old man who recently plead guilty to the murder of this man, Charles White. White was a forty-year-old man who was dating Braden’s ex-wife. Apparently, he didn’t like the idea that his ex was dating and it wasn’t his idea for the divorce. Braden had been stalking her for about six months by parking outside her house day and night. That must be why he was looking into the camera. He wanted her to know he was there.”
“Yikes!” I said and grabbed onto the base of my neck.
“I know. But you seemed sincerely nervous about the recordings. And you looked exhausted. Your hair was a mess and there were dark circles under your eyes. People lie to me all the time, but you can’t fake exhaustion. So, after talking to some other detectives, we decided to send the recordings to the FBI.” He paused and switched the photo to a pretty woman who I assumed was Braden’s ex-wife.
“Braden already confessed to murder before I even sent the video to the FBI, so the only investigation to be done was how you ended up with the recordings and not his ex.”
I waited for him to answer.
“Well, we don’t know. The FBI did their magic and found out who the men were and then basically followed the Wi-Fi trail.”
“And?”
“And, we don’t really know, Miss Collins. The best the experts can say is that somehow the wires got crossed,” he said, making finger quotes as he said experts.
“Okayyy,” I said. “Well, that’s freaking weird.”
“I agree. It’s weirder than hell, and I never heard of anything like it happening. I mean, sometimes people will pick up conversations on their nanny cams, somehow. But, this happened clear across the country in Denver.”
There was an awkward silence and he asked if I had any questions. I did not. He escorted me out and I drove to Tom’s house.
I renewed my blink subscription, safe in the knowledge that nobody was stalking me. I wasn’t home nearly as often, spending so much time with Tom and Oscar. In mid-January, I woke up and noticed my phone glowing. I looked at the clock on Tom’s bedside. It read 3:08 AM. I checked my phone and there was a notification that had just come through on my Blink camera. I set it down and went back to sleep.
Date Modified: 10-15-2025
