Mr. Ballin

And after a while, Barbara had really got the sense that these girls, they weren't just weirded out by her.

They were now actively scared of her, which really alienated Barbara a whole lot more.

And so all of that was why Barbara was now writing this letter.

She was telling her roommates that she was just going to go ahead and leave campus for a while to be with people that actually understood her.

And the people she was thinking of were people like Richard Finder, a self-proclaimed psychic that Barbara had connected with after she'd called into a radio show where Richard had been giving psychic readings.

And the two of them had connected immediately.

Because even though Richard was almost a decade older than her, he understood Barbara in a way that no one else in her life did.

And ever since, they'd had this really intense relationship that felt both romantic and spiritual at the same time.

But since Richard lived far away, most of their relationship so far had been over the phone.

And so Barbara thought it might be nice to be physically closer to Richard and also his circle of friends.

But there was another reason Barbara wanted to get away from BYU.

And that was because she had started to feel unsafe being a young woman on a college campus.

So recently there had been some scary national news stories about college women being attacked on campus.

One student in Washington State had been beaten and almost killed in her dorm room in January.

And another woman had gone missing the following month.

And even though these attacks had not literally happened at BYU, it still freaked Barbara out.

I mean, especially because these women who had been targeted just looked a lot like her physically, with long dark hair and sort of similar features.

And so as a precaution, Barbara had been taking judo classes at school and even got her best friend, Jerry Hicker, to help her buy a gun.

Except Barbara had actually lost her gun recently.

She'd not been able to find it for the last few weeks.