MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories
Killer Profile (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)
15 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What dark secret does the man share in the internet cafe?
One night in December of 2011, a man sat in front of his computer, anxiously staring at the words that he had just typed into a chat window. He was about to hit send and share his darkest secret with someone he'd only ever talked to online. And it was the kind of secret that could totally destroy him. And he knew sending it was probably a huge mistake.
But the loneliness and the guilt he was feeling was just sort of unbearable. and he felt like he had to tell someone. So after a long pause, he reached up and he hit send. 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 invite the follow button to go deep sea fishing with you, but don't tell them that they are going to be the bait. Okay, let's get into today's story. On the afternoon of Wednesday, November 17th, 2010, a 54-year-old woman named Diane Zaleski pulled her car into her driveway in Union Township, New Jersey, which is a small suburb of New York City.
Diane was just about to get out of her car and go inside when her cell phone inside of her purse began to ring. She opened it up and she looked at her phone And the caller ID said it was her sister-in-law, Debbie. So Diane picked it up and she said hello. And immediately, Debbie asked her for a favor. She said that she needed someone to drive her to a doctor's appointment the next day.
And she was wondering if Diane could do that. And Diane did not have to consult her calendar to know that her schedule tomorrow was wide open. Just a few months ago, she'd retired from her 17-year career as a legal secretary and then had moved to this particular neighborhood to be closer to her aging parents and her brother.
And so her only job at the moment was helping out her family, which didn't take up all their time. And tomorrow she was free. So Diane told Debbie, you know, that she'd see her tomorrow. And then the pair hung up. After that, Diane gathered up her things and got out of her car.
And then as she was about to walk inside of her home, she stopped and just turned around and looked out at her new neighborhood. And it was really nice here. I mean, the block was full of all these beautiful homes and well-kept lawns. I mean, this was just a really nice place to live.
And so as she was just, you know, staring out at the scene, she saw the woman who lived across the street, her name was Mrs. Yearwood, dragging her garbage cans down to the curb. And so Diane, you know, she waved to Mrs. Yearwood and smiled and...
also made a mental note to ask Mrs. Yearwood if her son, whose name was Arnel, was free to shovel her, Diane's, walkway tomorrow, because that night it was supposed to snow. Later that same night, sometime after 10 p.m., Diane was in bed with her laptop open, scrolling through messages on her online dating profile. Now, dating was sort of a normal part of Diane's life.
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Chapter 2: Who is Diane Zaleski and what events lead to her murder?
And so Stanley, you know, with his heart racing, he began walking, like following this trail of whatever got dragged through the house. And it made its way to the top of the stairs that led down into the basement. And then when Stanley looked down into the basement, he saw something at the foot of the stairs, like a heap of something that was down there.
And after a minute, once his eyes adjusted to the dark down there, he saw it was his daughter. And at that point, he sort of staggered back and he yelled out for his wife to call 911. Half an hour later, around one in the afternoon, Detective Robert Henderson of the Union County Homicide Task Force drove his police cruiser into a very nice, quiet neighborhood.
His partner, Detective Mike Monacchio, was sitting in the passenger seat. And at some point, Henderson, he pulled up to the snow-covered curb in front of a large house that was in the process of being roped off with crime scene tape. Henderson immediately noticed there was an elderly man and woman being interviewed by officers in the front yard of this house.
And as soon as Detective Henderson and his partner got out of their cruiser, one of the officers who was out and about ran over to brief them on what the police knew so far. He explained that the elderly man and woman were the parents of the victim, Diane Zaleski. Diane lived alone. This was her home.
and her parents had come over earlier and found her foyer covered in blood and Diane was found lying dead at the bottom of the stairs in the basement. Henderson asked if there were any signs of a break-in or a robbery, and the officer said no, but he warned them that the scene inside the house was really unusual.
It seemed like the killer, after killing Diane, had sort of been all over the house, clearly taking a lot of time to both clean up and also contaminate the scene to make it harder for investigators. And when Henderson heard this, he sort of raised an eyebrow because in his experience, most killers tried to get away from the crime scene as quickly as possible. They wouldn't just linger like that.
And so at this point, Henderson turned to Minocchio and was like, you know, how do you want to split this up here? And Minocchio said he would stay and interview Diane's parents. That way Henderson could go inside and inspect the rest of the crime scene. Moments later, Henderson stepped through the front door of Diane's house and he saw the huge amount of blood in the foyer.
There was so much that he assumed the murder must have taken place right here in the entryway. There was also a lot of white dust all over the floor that Henderson recognized as fire extinguisher powder.
Henderson couldn't see any evidence of a fire, so he guessed that what must have happened here is the killer had sprayed down the area with a fire extinguisher in an effort just to contaminate the scene. Henderson noticed there was a trail of blood that sort of left the entryway and headed towards the back of the house.
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Chapter 3: What happened on the day Diane was supposed to drive her sister-in-law?
And so now the case had just totally exploded. Around noon on December 2nd, 2010, so about two weeks after Diane's murder, Detective Henderson sat in his car outside of an office building in Newark, New Jersey, watching the front entrance. He'd been there all morning waiting for a worker whose name was Kyle Porter.
Kyle was one of the men that Diane had been messaging with online before she was killed. Henderson had already spoken to him over the phone and Kyle had actually confirmed that he had been to Diane's house just a few weeks before the murder. But what really made Henderson suspicious of Kyle
was just the fact that he had refused to submit a DNA sample, even after Henderson explained that doing so would help clear him as a suspect. So now, as Henderson finally saw Kyle step out of the building and head for the parking lot, Henderson got out of his car and literally ran over to intercept him.
And as he did, Henderson flashed his badge and Kyle, for a second, looked like he maybe wanted to run, but instead he just sort of stammered that he was gonna be late for his lunch meeting, sort of suggesting, like, I can't talk to you right now. But Henderson had not waited around all morning just to leave empty-handed here.
So he told Kyle that he could either give a sample right now and be on his way, or they could talk again when Henderson came back with a warrant for Kyle's arrest. And Kyle seemed terrified by that idea. So he sighed and said, OK, I'll give you a sample. Four days later, on the morning of December 6th, Henderson was out jogging before his shift when his cell phone rang.
He saw that it was the crime lab calling, so he stopped what he was doing, and he answered the call. A forensic analyst from the lab was on the line, and he explained that he was calling because they'd just finished with the first batch of Henderson's blood samples.
This batch included the samples for Mark Baker, the man who Henderson had to secretly trail just to pick up his water bottle, as well as Diane's ex-boyfriend, Lou Hubbard, aka Mike Prunell, and also Kyle Porter, the man she had met through online dating who, only after being threatened with arrest, offered up his DNA swab. And so Henderson held his breath as this analyst read off the results.
and not one of them matched the blood sample from the crime scene. For a moment, Henderson thought there really had to be a mistake here, because all three of those men had been so suspicious and so uncooperative. Now, he'd always known that, you know, the crime scene blood that he had tested their samples against maybe wasn't from the killer.
But if that was true, then Henderson was really in trouble, because it meant that after all this... He had nothing. Now, the blood from the crime scene had already been tested against the state's DNA bank, and there had been no matches. And now he's got no matches here with these three suspects, and so Henderson knew he really had no choice but to keep finding and testing more suspects.
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