Mr. Ballin

And now, of course, he would never get that chance.

On July 11th, so 11 days after Don and Charlie first got sick, with Don now deceased and Charlie alive but still unable to talk, the agencies working on the case had managed to eliminate almost every location that Don and Charlie had visited as the source of this toxic substance, except for one.

And that was Charlie's apartment.

And so Murphy sent the forensics team back to the apartment to search it all over again.

That afternoon, a lead officer with the forensics team stood in the middle of Charlie's small apartment alongside some of his colleagues.

This lead officer and his team were all dressed in these very heavy-duty protective suits, so they moved slowly around the cramped space as they took samples of surfaces and bagged potential evidence.

All the stuff, all the clutter in the apartment made it really hard to get around.

There were clothes on the floor and open bags of fabric and dirty dishes stacked in the sink and on the counters and overflowing trash cans.

And in the bedroom, there was a bunch of makeup and some hair dye boxes scattered on the floor along with needles and other drug paraphernalia.

There was not a ton of furniture in the apartment.

but it was all over the place because paramedics had pushed it around during their response.

And other areas of the place were littered with medical debris, like rubber gloves and plastic wrappers.

And there was also just some trash and just kind of like random objects, water bottles, plastic toys piled up on the windowsills.

It was almost like there was literally too much in the apartment to even effectively test it all.

But as the lead officer walked around doing his best to identify things to be tested,

something on a counter caught his eye.

It was an object that looked very different from anything else in the apartment.

Now, to understand what happened to Don and Charlie, you have to go back in time to three and a half months before they got sick, when an unrelated older man and a younger woman were found unresponsive on a park bench in Salisbury and brought to the Salisbury District Hospital, the same one that Don and Charlie would go to.

Now, this older man and the young woman, when they came into the hospital, they were experiencing seizures and they couldn't stop vomiting.

But after being treated at the hospital, they actually both fully recovered.