He stated that he didn’t even remember Elizabeth Park by sight, although she had worked in the chapel during the wedding preparations.

There was no direct evidence against him.

No belongings of the woman, traces of Elizabeth’s DNA, or keys to the bunker were found in her caravan.

The investigation found itself in a Zuk situation.

The only irrefutable proof that could link Miller to the crime was the paternity of the child.

Detective Gallow insisted on performing a complex and risky procedure, amniocentesis, the extraction of amniotic fluid to perform DNA tests on a fetus.

It was a cruel decision in relation to the traumatized Elizabeth, but there was no other way to prove Miller’s guilt or to clear him of all suspicion.

While the forensic team awaited the results of the genetic test, a major breakthrough occurred in Elizabeth’s ward.

A psychotherapist, Dr.

Alice Morgan, who was working with the victim, noticed a strange reaction to certain sounds.

Elizabeth, who was still in a state of semi-absence, suddenly began to respond to low vibrations.

During the session, when a heavy truck drove past the hospital, Elizabeth shuddered and covered her ears with her hands.

Dr.

Morgan began to carefully ask her about the sounds in the dark.

The woman whispered, staring intently.

First the ground began to shake, then he came.

Elizabeth didn’t remember the faces, but her body remembered the vibration.

He described the sound he heard before each visit from his executioner.

It wasn’t a voice or the sound of footsteps, it was a deep, prolonged buzzing that penetrated the walls and made even your teeth vibrate.

He said that sometimes that buzzing formed a melody, a heavy, slow melody that was chilling.

After receiving the doctor’s report, Detective Galway immediately contacted an acoustics expert.

The expert’s opinion was key to understanding the situation.

The bunker’s soundproofing was designed to absorb mid and high frequencies, shouts, conversations, and street noise.

However, low frequencies, such as infrasound or bass, could penetrate the thickness of concrete and earth.

The only instrument in the chapel capable of producing such powerful low-frequency vibrations was an old pipe organ.

Its tubes, some 16 feet long, created a sound that was felt not in the ears, but throughout the entire body.

The puzzle began to form a terrifying image.

The kidnapper did not go to Elizabeth Alazar.

His visits were timed to coincide with the times when the organ played in the chapel.

The music masked the sounds of the heavy door opening and drowned out any possible screams from the victim.

This meant that the criminal not only had the keys, knew the rehearsal schedule, or worse, was the one who pressed the keys, making the air in the tubes roar to alert the victim of his arrival.

But David Miller didn’t know how to play the organ.

On February 12, 2018, the halls of the Legacy Emmanuel Medical Center were filled with an oppressive silence, broken only by the whirring of fluorescent lights.

Detective James Gallow was holding a sealed envelope with the logo of the state crime lab.

That document was supposed to end the investigation, confirming handyman David Miller’s involvement in the heinous crime and allowing the prosecution to file formal charges.

Benjamin Park, sitting in a plastic chair in front of his wife’s room , looked like a shadow of his former self.

Her eyes, sunken from insomnia, gazed hopefully at the detective’s face .

But when Galy opened the envelope and scanned the lines of the report, his expression changed.

The test results surprised the entire research team.

David Miller was not the child’s father.

The genetic material also did not match the samples of the deceased cemetery caretaker, Arthur Blackwood.

Furthermore, the DNA profile was uploaded to the Codis national criminal database and did not yield a single match.

The girl’s biological father, and therefore Elizabeth’s kidnapper, was a ghost.

A man who had never been on law enforcement’s radar , had never been arrested, and had never served in the military.

This news dashed Benjamin’s last hopes of having a speedy trial.

Police were forced to release Miller on bail, as there was no direct evidence against him.

The case stalled again.

The investigators routinely rechecked the thousands of people who might have been in the chapel area, but Benjamin realized he couldn’t wait any longer.

The official investigation was too slow, too bureaucratic, and, as it turned out, blind.

On February 14, he launched his own investigation.

Their target was the Multnoma County Central Library, a huge building in downtown Portland that housed the archives of all the city’s newspapers and historical documents.

As an architect, Benjamin knew that buildings have memory.

If the police were looking for a person, he decided to look for traces of the alterations to the chapel.

He spent hours searching through microfilm, studying back issues of local newspapers from the 1990s, when Oak’s stone chapel was undergoing large-scale renovations.

On the third day of searching, while browsing the Oregonian’s archives from September 1995, he found an article about the completion of the restoration work.

The article was illustrated with a group photo of the construction team and clergy in front of the renovated facade.

Most of the faces were blurred or hidden by shadows, but one figure caught Benjamin’s attention.

He was a young man who was standing a little to the side of the pastor.

He was wearing an elegant suit, atypical for a worker, and was holding a plan.

The caption read Simon Closs, deputy chief architect of the project.

But it wasn’t the name that made Benjamin’s heart skip a beat.

Hanging from the man’s belt was a huge bunch of keys.

These were not ordinary modern keys, but long, ancient tools with curly barbs designed for complex internal mechanisms .

One of the keys had a distinctive quatrefoil-shaped head , just like the one Benjamin had seen on the locks of the door leading to the chapel’s basement.

Benjamin enlarged the image on the projector screen.

Simon Cross’s face, even through the grain of the old film, seemed painfully familiar to him.

It was only a short time ago that I had seen those sharp cheekbones, that heavy gaze in those deep-set eyes.

The architect’s memory, focused on the details, began to review the events of the fateful wedding day.

October 15, 2016.

Chaos at the entrance.

A catering van stops.

The driver, a tall man in a service uniform, helps unload cases of champagne.

He doesn’t speak to the guests, he stays in the shadows, but he watches the entrance.

Benjamin remembers how this man held the door for him when he was bringing in boxes of decorations.

At the time he didn’t pay much attention to him, thinking he was just another employee.

But now, looking at the photograph from 20 years ago, he realized that the architect’s assistant , Simon Cross, and the catering driver were the same person.

The criminal was not only in the building, he was part of the wedding, he was among the guests.

serving them, possibly even serving them drinks, while planning the kidnapping.

Upon realizing this fact, Benjamin suffered an attack of nausea mixed with rage.

He didn’t call Detective Gallow.

His trust in the police had been shattered.

He had to see for himself.

That night, under a torrential downpour, Benjamin arrived at Heaven Chapel.

The building was dark and silent, surrounded by yellow police tape that had already sunk under the weight of the water.

Breaking through the perimeter, he approached the service entrance.

The lock was sealed, but that was no obstacle for the architect who knew the weak points of ancient structures.

He pushed open the sacristy window frame and went in.

The interior smelled of dampness and old incense.

Benjamin turned on a powerful construction flashlight.

The beam of light tore the empty pews and the altar from the darkness, where he had never expected his bride, but his target was further down.

He went to the boiler room, where he found the entrance to the bunker.

The descent to the basement was like a plunge into hell.

The air here still retained the same sweetish, putrid smell that had not faded even after the work of the experts.

Benjamin walked through the metal door cut by the oxyacetylene torch and found himself in the cell where his wife had spent 478 days.

The room was empty.

The police had taken the mattress and the bucket as evidence.

Only the bare walls remained, covered with the remnants of the soundproofing.

Benjamin slowly began moving the beam of his flashlight along the walls, looking for anything the forensic team might have missed in their haste.

The police were looking for biological traces, fingerprints, and textile fibers.

Benjamin was looking for a message.

I knew that an isolated person always tries to leave a trace.

He found it in the furthest and darkest corner, half a meter from the ground.

There were barely visible scratches where the shadow of the pipe fell on the concrete wall.

The forensic team had ignored them, dismissing them as defects in the concrete or marks from construction tools.

But Benjamin illuminated them at an angle and saw clear, deep lines.

The inscription had been made with something sharp, perhaps a piece of metal buckle or even a fingernail that had been scraped until the hard concrete bled.

The letters were crooked and uneven, but they were legible.

It wasn’t Elizabeth’s handwriting.

They were words scribbled by a sure and strong hand, words that turned an ordinary kidnapping into an act of religious madness.

October 15, 2016.

The cleaning has begun.

Benjamin backed away from the wall as if it were fire.

For the kidnapper, the wedding date was not the day of the crime; it was the beginning of a ritual.

The word purification echoed in the silence of the basement, giving everything that had happened a completely different, manic meaning.

Suddenly, from above, from the main hall of the chapel, I heard the unmistakable sound of footsteps.

Someone heavy and confident was walking on the wooden floor right above Benjamin’s head, heading for the door that led to the basement.

On February 20, 2018, the atmosphere in clinical psychologist Alice Morgan’s office was tense to the point of being overwhelming.

The air smelled of antiseptic and lavender, an aroma that was supposed to be calming, but in this situation only accentuated the sterility of the horror that lurked in the patient’s subconscious.

Elizabeth Park, who until then had only communicated in fragmented phrases, agreed to a deep hypnotic regression session.

It was a risky step that Detective Gallow insisted on, knowing that time was running out, and the author, whose name the investigation now knew, Simon Cross, was still at large.

Elizabeth was sitting in a deep leather armchair with her eyes unfocused.

Listening to Dr.

Morgan’s monotonous voice, he slowly immersed himself in the day his mind had tried to erase for the sake of self-preservation.

October 15, 2016.

I was back in the bride’s room.

I could smell the lacquer and the fresh white roses on the table.

Entrance, Elizabeth began to speak.

Her voice changed, becoming calm and trembling, as if she were once again the happy bride a minute before the disaster.

He described hearing a knock at the door.

At that moment she was sure it was her friend Sara, who had come to fix her makeup.

Elizabeth, looking at herself in the mirror, shouted, “Go ahead!” The pomocotón that appeared in the reflection of the mirror.

A tall male figure dressed in the black cassock of a Catholic priest entered the room.

It was the perfect camouflage for a wedding in a chapel.

None of the guests or staff would have noticed the clergyman’s presence in the hallway.

Elizabeth recalled how surprised she was that it wasn’t old Reverend Thomas who was going to perform the ceremony.

He was a young man with sharp cheekbones and a heavy, fanatical gaze.

He wasn’t threatening with a gun.

He slowly closed the door behind him, gave a gentle, almost paternal smile, and said a phrase that is now recorded in the interrogation reports.

You are too pure for him, my daughter.

I have come to save your soul.

Before Elizabeth could scream, he stepped forward and placed a cloth over her face, which was impregnated with the pungent, sweet smell of ether and chloroform.

The world around her faded away and the last thing she saw were Simon Cross’s eyes filled with distorted adoration.

But the worst memories resurfaced when the psychologist took Elizabeth further into the darkness of her 478 days in prison.

During the session, the woman began to cry, holding onto the armrests of the chair until her knuckles turned white.

He spoke about the ceremonies.

Her captor did not limit himself to keeping her prisoner.

He created for her an alternative reality, a perverse one-person theater.

Simon Cross never called her Elizabeth.

For him, she was Maria.

He made her take off the hospital pajamas he had brought her and put on another dress.

It wasn’t her modern wedding dress; it was an old, yellowish dress with 1930s-style lace that smelled of mothballs and smoke.

The fabric was so old it wrinkled under his fingers, but Cross treated it like a shrine.

She would light candles when the power went out and spend hours preaching to them about the sinfulness of the world, how marriage to Benjamin would defile her purity, and that only here underground could she remain holy.

Maria’s name became the key that finally allowed the investigation to tie up all the loose ends.

Detective Gallow, after receiving the recording of the hypnosis session, immediately consulted the missing persons department’s files from the past 20 years.

The search for the name Maria yielded dozens of results, but one of them made the blood run cold in the veins of the experienced researcher.

In November 1998, Maria Santos, a 14-year-old orphan, disappeared without a trace in Portland.

She had escaped from an orphanage and was last seen at a bus stop in the Viverton neighborhood.

His body was never found and the case was closed as a runaway.

But the most important detail was the place where he disappeared.

It was St.

Mary’s Boys Home, which was closed in 2002 due to numerous health violations and funding scandals.

When Galay opened the construction documents for the closed orphanage, she saw a familiar name.

The chief architect who had designed the new extension and underground hip room in the 1990s was Archibald Cross, Simon’s father.

Simon, who was 18 at the time, worked on the construction site as his father’s assistant.

He had access to the blueprints, the keys, and, even more terrifying, to the basements where the concrete foundations were being poured.

The investigators understood the criminal’s horrific logic.

Maria Santos did not escape.

She became Simon’s first girlfriend, his first attempt to create a clean world underground.

The old wedding dress he forced Elizabeth to wear was probably stolen from the church props of the same asylum or bought by him for Maria 20 years ago.

Elizabeth Park was not the first victim, but a substitute.

She was going to be the reincarnation of his first love, lost or murdered.

But there was one more nuance in Elizabeth’s memories that haunted Benjamin as he listened to the recording of the session.

Besides the deep drone of the organ, Elizabeth remembered another sound that accompanied the ceremonies in the final months of her imprisonment, when Cross was probably moving her or preparing a new location.

I heard water.

Not the dripping of a tap or the sound of rain, it was a powerful and continuous roar of falling water that penetrated even his drowsy state.

This sound image, the memory of the water, was the final detail of the aggressor’s profile.

Simon Cross, the architect of pain, did not simply hide.

He built his sanctuaries where the noise of nature could drown out the screams of his victims.

And when Gallowy overlaid a map of the Cross family’s construction projects onto a map of Oregon’s natural attractions, one spot lit up with a red alert.

It was an old, abandoned maintenance facility that had been forgotten by everyone except the one person who knew how to turn concrete and stone into a tomb.

The detective picked up the phone and ordered the assault team to prepare to leave, knowing that they were not only going to arrest a criminal, but to descend into the heart of his madness.

On February 21, 2018, the Portland Police Department initiated an official pursuit of a particularly dangerous criminal.

The photo of Simon Cross that Benjamin Park found in the library archive appeared on every television channel in Oregon.

That same night, investigators revealed a chilling detail that explained how the kidnapper managed to carry out the crime in front of hundreds of guests.

Simon Cross wasn’t just hiding in the shadows, he was an official member of the wedding team.

It turned out that for the 6 months prior to the kidnapping, Cross had been working at a wedding agency under the fictitious name of Arthur Grey.

Their responsibilities included logistics and technical support for the ceremonies.

It was Arthur Grey who insisted on personally checking the condition of the chapel locks a week before the event, apparently for security reasons.

This gave him the opportunity not only to examine every corner of the building, but also to make duplicates of the keys to all the doors, including forgotten secret passageways and technical hatches that the current owners didn’t even know about.

Detective Galloway, analyzing the diaries found in Arthur Grey’s apartment, drew a terrifying psychological portrait.

Cross was obsessed with the idea of ​​the virgin bride.

He observed Elizabeth for months.

She attended all the wedding rehearsals, hiding backstage or pretending to check the equipment.

In his distorted perception of reality, he did not consider himself a kidnapper.

He believed he was saving Elizabeth from a marriage that, in his religious delirium, he equated with mortal sin.

I was preparing her for a higher purpose.

While the police were checking Cross’s possible escape routes, Benjamin Park continued studying the notes that Elizabeth had started taking on the advice of her doctor.

In a paragraph written with a trembling hand, he recalled the sound that accompanied his transfer from one place of detention to another.

He wrote, “It wasn’t the sound of pipes.

It was a roar.

The ground shook as if the sky were falling.

There was water everywhere.

” Benjamin, as an architect, realized that this acoustic effect couldn’t be produced by the city’s sewer system or water supply .

It was the sound of a natural element.

He overlaid this information on a map of objects designed by Simon Cross’s father, and one spot perfectly matched the description.

It was an old, decommissioned hydroelectric pumping station located in the woods less than a mile from the base of Mnoma Falls.

The building was constructed in the 1930s and had a complex system of underground reservoirs.

It was ideal for someone wanting to hide a person.

The sound of the waterfall, cascading from a height of 620 feet, reliably drowned out any screams, and the thick concrete walls blocked cell phone signals.

At 5 a.

m.

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