Mr. Ballin

One evening in March of 1974, an investigator in Salt Lake City, Utah sat across an interrogation table from a man who claimed he had psychic powers.

Now, the investigator had naturally been quite skeptical of this man and his powers, but the man began giving him a bunch of very specific visions about the case the investigator was trying to solve.

And in fact, some of the information he was revealing was enough to make the investigator wonder, could this man actually be a psychic?

Or was he the killer?

But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the strange, dark, and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do.

So if that's of interest to you, please go on an unbelievable, amazing vacation with the follow button and volunteer to take pictures for them.

But every time you take a picture of them, secretly turn the camera around and just take selfies of yourself.

Okay, let's get into today's story.

On March 11th, 1974, 22-year-old Barbara Rockey sat at a desk in her bedroom in Provo, Utah, writing furiously.

As she was writing, eventually she paused for a minute to reread what she had written, but she wasn't quite happy yet, so she added a few more lines.

The letter she was writing was for her roommates, and she knew it had to be perfect, because Barbara was saying goodbye.

So Barbara was a junior at Brigham Young University, or BYU, which was a very religious school where most students were practicing Mormons, but not Barbara.

She had chosen to go to BYU because of religion, but really just because she was fascinated by it and thought going to a school structured around faith would be very interesting.

But when she actually got there, she immediately felt out of place because her classmates went to church every week for hours at a time, and they all followed a pretty strict set of behavioral rules and values, which wasn't really Barbara's thing.

Barbara was from California and considered herself more of a free spirit who liked exploring new ideas and trying new things.

So over the last three years, Barbara had felt both frustrated and also alienated by the other students' very rigid lifestyles.

She'd been hoping that that would change with her new living situation.

She'd just moved in with seven other girls in January.

But now, just two months into that, it was already very obvious that those girls did not like her.

They were just as religious as the rest of the kids at BYU, and they seemed to think Barbara was weird for doing things like dating around and experimenting with different religions.