There had never been such a big police presence in and around this sleepy rural village in Central America, but ex-police dog Zena had shaken things up massively when she would not stop barking at a seemingly random tree.
Only when her owner managed to break it open did he realize what Zena had detected inside it. He immediately called the police, and they came with every available officer. The first officer that arrived could not believe what he was witnessing…Click Here To Continue Reading>> …Click Here To Continue Reading>>
How could it have come to this? Hidden in a tree, nonetheless. Deep down, he and everybody else on the force had known that something was going to happen—they just never expected it to be this.
Within half an hour, there were at least 20 officers on the scene, ready to start asking questions to everybody who lived in the area. Among the arrivals were also two forensic experts who had come to investigate the discovery in the tree. They needed to get answers as quickly as possible. It was a disturbing sight for sure, but the part of the discovery in the tree that really put everybody on edge was the clothes that were inside—more specifically, the uniform. Why did ex-police dog Zena keep barking at the tree? What did the police discover inside, and why did they bring their entire team down there?
John could hear Zena barking in the distance. He had lost her for a second when she unexpectedly ran off during their forest walk. It had caught him completely off guard, as she had not done anything like this since he adopted her. Why had she run off now? He started running through the forest in the direction of the barking. Suddenly, he started to get a bit afraid. Zena was an ex-police dog. What if she had found something she was trained to find? There was a good chance this was not going to be pretty.
He eventually found Zena just outside the forest. John was holding his breath but quickly calmed down when he saw what Zena was doing. But this calm demeanor would quickly fade away when John started to discover more about what was truly happening here.
Zena was standing deadly still, staring straight at a strange-looking tree that stood just outside the forest. She just kept barking at it, and for a second, John was just stunned. Could she have been chasing an animal that had run up the tree or something? Maybe, but that would be so out of character for her. Zena was an ex-police dog—she, of all dogs, was able to keep herself from getting so distracted or fixated on some random animals. There had to be something else going on.
John had never seen her so full of energy and spirit. But what was it? After inspecting the tree, John could not find anything wrong with it. All that stood out to him was that the tree seemed to be dead, as nothing was growing on it anymore. But this did not directly raise any concerns for him. In hindsight, maybe it should have. Part of him wanted to just grab Zena’s line again and drag her home, but he had to admit to himself that his curiosity had been piqued. The tree was old and had barely any leaves left, so he could see there was nothing up there that Zena was reacting to. There had to be something inside it.
He inspected the tree and found that the bark seemed relatively thin, and when he knocked on it, it sounded hollow. Could Zena actually be right about this? Was there really something inside? John knew that he could not get into the tree with his bare hands, but then he spotted a small house in the distance. John tied Zena to a tree nearby and quickly made his way to the house. He was able to borrow an axe from the owner. The owner was very kind and did not even need to know what John needed it for.
When John returned, Zena was still there, barking at the tree. This dog had no quit in her, and so John started hacking at the tree. After a few big swings, he already felt like he was breaking through the layer of bark, and with a few well-placed hits, he actually managed to get through it. But to his great surprise, he felt his axe land in something soft inside the tree. Unsure and somewhat nervous about what he had just hit, John proceeded with a lot more caution. He placed the axe in the hole he just made and started ripping it open to make it bigger until, with one of the pulls, a very large piece of the bark gave way, revealing what was hidden inside the tree.
Zena started barking even louder now, and John dropped the axe out of pure shock. He could not believe it—was this what he had been hacking into? He needed to get the police there as soon as possible. This needed to be investigated with the highest priority.
At first, the officer that got the call didn’t believe John when he told him what he had found—an ex-police dog, a strange tree, and then that discovery. It all just sounded ridiculous, but he knew that he needed to check it out on the off chance that John was telling the truth. He went to see John alone, but within a minute after he arrived, he had already called all available units in the area to come right away. Everything that John had told him was true. Laying at the foot of the broken tree was a motionless figure wearing a police outfit.
The officer did not want to come any closer than he had to, as this was not something he was qualified to handle. He made sure John and Zena moved back and started setting up a perimeter. As more people in the area had gotten wind of what was going on—everything was out in the open, so everybody was able to see it—he was unable to stop people from taking pictures.
Only when the backup started arriving were they able to lead people away from the area, at least until they were ready to start asking them some questions. But first, the forensics had to get to work. Nobody had been close to the figure ever since John had made it fall out of the tree, so nobody knew what they were dealing with. Every officer and bystander stood there with bated breath, waiting to hear some conclusions.
Maybe Zena could help. Zena’s owner, John, was very much ready to go home after this crazy experience. He had answered all the questions that the officers had for him and wanted to leave. But Zena was not ready to leave at all. She was not barking anymore, but she still had not taken her eyes off the find. And this, of course, made sense. She used to be a police dog, and whenever she made a find like this before, she always had a lot more to do afterward. She probably still had a bit of the scent and wanted to look for a trail.
John knew that he would never be able to convince Zena to leave this place now, so he talked to the police about maybe letting her come out of retirement to help. Officer Jerry, who had arrived first on the scene, actually still remembered Zena and knew her former partner very well, so he seemed open to the idea. He decided to give it a shot. He hoped that Zena could maybe find a trail leading away from the tree. Since she was the one who had found it, maybe she could discover something they had missed.
However, Jerry knew she would only listen to her former partner, so he quickly got on the phone. Zena’s former partner was an officer named Oliver, who had also retired by then. Luckily, he was more than happy to come over and assist when he heard what was going on.
The strange story of how Zena had found something that significant in the tree easily piqued his curiosity. Oliver immediately got on the road and arrived about an hour later. The reunion between Oliver and Zena was heartwarming. John had not seen Zena so happy since the day he adopted her. It was obvious that she had missed her partner very much, but that was a concern for later, as there was important work to do now.
While they had been waiting for Oliver to arrive, Jerry had already spoken to his colleagues, and they were all fine with giving Zena a chance. They did not bring any other police dogs, so who knew what valuable insights she could provide? So, Oliver led her back to the tree, where she was able to get a good scent. After a while, Zena started sniffing around the tree and then quickly made her way away from it, with everybody in attendance watching in anticipation. Zena had found a scent, and she was following the trail, but it didn’t last long and led to a disappointing end. Zena’s search had ended at a muddy spot where some tire marks were still visible in the mud.
Other officers had already taken note of this and determined that the marks led to the nearby road. Whoever was responsible for this had most likely escaped that way. It was a dead end, but luckily, the forensic experts did make some progress in the meantime. While Zena was doing her thing, the forensic team swabbed the evidence that had fallen out of the tree and ran some tests on it. They looked for particles they could use to track down whoever did this. But when the test results came back, they were shocked—there was way more to this story than they had first anticipated.
The forensic expert eventually managed to come up with some conclusions. One of them was very comforting, and the other one was very worrying. The first was that they were not dealing with a dead body, but some kind of doll. It seemed to have been handmade. But that wasn’t everything. The police uniform that the doll was wearing was an actual uniform of the local police, and the forensic experts even managed to determine who it had belonged to. They had found the name on the badge, and when the officers heard it, they READ FULL STORY HERE>>>CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING>>>
immediately recognized it. It was the name and badge of Corporal Mike.
Corporal Mike had been with the force for about 15 years and had always been an example for others. Up until a few months ago, he was always seen by many as a truly reliable colleague and even a friend. But recently, his reputation was shattered by an incident that the police had been very vague about to the public. From one day to the next, Mike had suddenly left the force, and to make it even stranger, he was also completely scrubbed out of the publicly available registers. The police had insisted that he left on his own accord, but most officers knew that this wasn’t true.
The truth was that Mike had been caught in the act while he was taking pictures of confidential documents that the police station had in holding. He was not only fired on the spot because of it, but the state also wanted to take him to court for this. But it never came that far. The very next day, Mike had seemingly disappeared from the face of the Earth. Because the police had not wanted any of this information to come out, they only did some small, low-key search efforts, but they found nothing that could tell them more about where Mike had gone. After about a month, they had to give up their efforts and shift their focus to other cases.
They were still not sure what exactly Mike had learned from these documents, but they were highly confidential for a reason. There were some people at the top who still feared that this information would get out into the public. A lot of the officers had forgotten about Mike and the whole situation, but finding his uniform like this had really shaken them awake in a way. All the previously unanswered questions started coming back to their minds again, along with a lot of new ones.
Jerry, who had arrived at the scene first, felt like he had really let Mike down. He got a pit in his stomach thinking about what could have possibly happened to him and swore that he was going to find out. He owed it to his old colleague. He called his chief of police to ask if he could lead this investigation, but to his surprise, he got a harsh “no” in return. Apparently, the chief wanted this case to be handled by a department from another city to avoid a conflict of interest. Jerry found this bizarre, as he and his colleagues knew much more about Mike and the case as a whole already. Why were they not allowed to use this knowledge?
But he also knew his chief well enough to know that he was not going to be able to change his mind. However, that didn’t stop Jerry. He was determined to find out what happened to Mike, whether his chief knew he was investigating it or not. He called in a couple of favors from the other officers and the forensics on the scene so that they would also relay all the information they found directly to him.
Over the next couple of days, Jerry collected all the relevant information they had found about the lifelike doll and Mike’s police clothes. On the items they had found, there were mostly Mike’s DNA and fingerprints, but also those of somebody else. Sadly, this person was not in their system yet, so he decided to go over the interviews.
Jerry wasn’t there when the interviews took place, so he might have missed something because of that. Luckily, they always made reports after every interview, so Jerry could easily read what everyone talked about. And there was one person who stood out. Most of the people in the area that were interviewed after the discovery had no relevant information, except, of course, for John and one other man. The other man was the owner of the house where John had gone to get the axe—the axe that he used to cut open the tree. He was the only person in the area that actually had a view of the tree from his house. And while he had not seen anybody tamper with the tree, he did notice something odd.
One day, early in the morning, he had heard a car speed past his house. The car came from the direction of the tree. The man had found this strange, as the road ended right before it, and there was nothing in that direction. It was just mud and sand. Why did that car need to be there that early in the morning? This could be a breakthrough, Jerry thought. If the man could remember the number plate, they could track down the car and its owner.
Jerry did his best to hide his excitement and asked the man if he remembered anything else important. Sadly, his response was disappointing. The man had not been able to see the number plate, but he did recognize what kind of car it was, and he also remembered the color. It was a red Dodge SUV Hellcat—not an easy car to forget. Not for the man, and not for Jerry, as he himself also remembered this car very well. This was the exact car Mike had always come to work with. It was his pride and joy, and he was always bragging about it at the office.
So, did Mike himself set all of this up? Or was somebody else involved here? And what could either of their motives even be? For a while, the police felt like they had hit a wall in the investigation. Jerry put out a search warrant for Mike’s car in the hopes that this could get them somewhere, but they did not have high hopes.
However, a big surprise was waiting for them. Just a week after the search warrant was put out, Jerry got a call from a befriended officer one town over. He had worked at the station at the same time as Mike and recognized by the stickers on the car that it was actually Mike’s. He had spotted it going into a garage. Immediately, Jerry was on his way. He didn’t tell anybody at the station, as they still did not know that he was doing his own investigation. He was sure that they would not approve, so he kept it a secret.
A couple of hours later, he arrived at the house that the other officer had told him about, and he was surprised by what he saw. This did not look like the house of an officer that had been fired and out of a job for a while. It was huge, and it looked extremely expensive as well. Jerry took a deep breath and rang the doorbell. After a few moments, the door was swung open, and Jerry recognized the man immediately. It was Mike, and he was looking great. To Jerry’s surprise, Mike seemed almost ecstatic to see him. He thought that was weird, because they had barely even known each other at the time of the force. Mike loudly exclaimed, “Finally, somebody found me! What took you so long?”
Jerry walked into the house with Mike, confused, and then Mike started explaining everything to him. The whole police doll in the tree had been a stunt he pulled to somehow get the attention of somebody in the forest. He wanted to find somebody who cared about what happened to him, to find him. He knew the chiefs would not come looking for him, so his hope was set on a brave solo officer—and Jerry turned out to be exactly that person.
And the reason Mike wanted somebody to find him was that he wanted to share the real reason why he had been fired from the force. While doing some document ordering, Mike had found some hidden documents with incriminating evidence against a local millionaire. But when the chief caught him taking pictures of it, he was fired on the spot. The chief was in on it, and he worked hard to keep everything in that document a secret. Jerry could hardly believe what Mike was telling him. He knew the chief could act a bit suspicious from time to time, but he never imagined he would withhold important or even incriminating evidence from his superiors.
But that wasn’t all. What Mike told Jerry next was even more shocking. On the day when Mike found out that the chief was being paid off by the millionaire, he too was made an offer to have his silence bought. And Mike accepted the offer, so he intended to keep the millionaire’s secret, but he still wanted to do something about the corrupt police chief. This is where Jerry came in. Mike wanted him to lobby with the other officers to get them all on the same page and get the chief fired just like Mike was.
Jerry found this all a bizarre story, but he never liked the chief anyway, so he was easily convinced to join the plan of getting him fired. Jerry went home that night feeling confused and strange. This whole situation was bizarre, to say the least. Was he really going to go against the chief to get him fired? And why was Mike even so set on getting the chief fired if he was doing the same thing—being paid to remain silent?
Jerry had to really think about this, so he couldn’t decide right away. But the following morning, when the chief barged into his office to scold him for doing his own investigation, his decision was easily made. Jerry decided he had enough of the chief’s tirade and wanted someone honest to take his place. Jerry shared the information about the corrupt chief with the other senior officers, and eventually, their group became large enough to get the chief fired. Mike finally got what he wanted, but Jerry could have never guessed what was going to happen to him next.
With the chief gone, the police force needed a new man in charge, and all the other officers thought that Jerry was perfect for the job. And so, a strange chain of events that started with ex-police dog Zena making a discovery in a tree led to a corrupt police chief being fired and honest cop Jerry taking his place.
How strange the world can work sometimes.
