His sharp, trained eye slowly slid across the background of the video, methodically analyzing every shadow, every flash of light, and every car parked in the area.

At 7:20 in the morning, the external camera captured a subtle detail that literally froze the investigator’s blood .

At the very edge of the digital frame, under the thick morning shadow of the enormous gas station billboard, a large, heavy truck remained absolutely motionless.

It was an old Ford from the 250 series, dark in color and with blurred outlines in the gloom.

Its windows were tinted with a thick black film, which constituted a direct violation of Oregon traffic laws.

The truck did not stop at the fuel pumps, its doors did not open, and no one got out of the truck to go to the store.

It simply stood there like a dangerous predator on the prowl, waiting for its prey.

The engine was running.

In the high-contrast video, the detective was able to make out a subtle cloud of gray exhaust fumes in the fresh morning air.

At 7:42 a.

m.

, a dark green Subaru Outback belonging to the tourists smoothly drove away from the site and entered the main road heading east into the forest.

In that same second, a huge dark truck slowly emerged, without any sudden movements, from the thick shadows and followed him.

The Ford driver maintained a perfect, professionally calculated distance of about 200 feet on the road.

He did n’t get too close so as not to accidentally raise suspicion, but he didn’t lose sight of his future victims for a moment.

Detective Mitchell lay back in silence, feeling a heavy pressure on his chest.

It was not a tragic coincidence or a chance encounter in the mountains.

The unknown predator had begun its methodical hunt long before the couple set foot on the forest path.

His fate was sealed in that sunny parking lot.

The next, incredibly difficult step was to track that unsettling caravan along Highway 26.

Police urgently sent official requests for data from all traffic cameras up to the Governance Camp area.

The work was made much more difficult due to the low resolution of the old lenses and the dense morning fog that hung over the asphalt.

However, the two blurry recordings managed to clearly capture the same unchanging pattern.

The dark Ford followed the tourists’ car like a ghostly shadow.

The real technical breakthrough came thanks to the recording of an automatic radar located near the turnoff to the tourist area.

The camera took a quick series of pictures of the rear of the truck.

The car’s license plate was deliberately covered by a thick layer of light forest dirt, making it absolutely impossible to read with the naked eye.

The detectives had to turn to the best specialists in digital image restoration from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

After 14 hours of exhausting, non-stop work with special algorithms to eliminate noise and repeatedly increase contrast, the experts finally managed to recognize the exact combination of letters and numbers for the state of Oregon.

Detective Mitchell immediately entered the recovered identification number into the unified national vehicle database.

The system blinked while processing the query and returned a detailed result in a few seconds.

It turned out that the Dark Ford 250 series had never belonged to a private individual.

It was registered to a commercial company called Cascade Pix Outpost.

With this clue, the investigators immediately consulted all the state’s tax records and files.

What they found in the papers only increased the mystical and depressing horror of the case.

Official documents showed that the Cascade Pix Outpost company had been involved in large-scale logging in the past .

However, this company officially declared bankruptcy and was liquidated almost 7 years ago.

All of its assets had to be sold and its financial accounts permanently closed.

The company’s registered address led to a long-demolished building in an abandoned industrial area of ​​Portland.

The truck turned out to be a genuine ghost car.

It belonged to a non-existent company and did not legally exist, but someone was still regularly paying the annual registration fees through convoluted anonymous bank transfers.

Someone had been carefully maintaining the vehicle for years, precisely for that damn business.

Detectives immediately requested an urgent federal bank secrecy order to trace the origin of these payments.

They knew perfectly well that this financial transaction would inevitably lead them to the real name of the owner of the clandestine operation.

When the computer system finally completed its checks and displayed the payer’s name on the bright screen, the crowded investigators’ office fell into a deathly, icy silence.

While the technical department unraveled the complex digital trail of the phantom car step by step, another group of detectives delved into the victims’ past.

To understand who could have committed such an unthinkable crime in an underground bunker, investigators had to break down the lives of 28-year-old James Nuñez and 26-year-old Rain W into their smallest atoms .

They were looking for any hidden secret that might have been the catalyst for the tragedy.

During the next 72 hours, the exhausted detectives conducted dozens of detailed interviews with family members, friends, and colleagues.

The finance department examined all of the couple’s bank accounts and tax returns for the past 5 years.

Computer experts seized laptops from his home, slowly reconstructing his internet search history and deleted messages.

The results of this colossal work turned out to be completely empty.

The couple’s biographies were very clear.

James worked as a successful architect at a prestigious firm in Portland.

Lord Rein was a talented graphic designer.

They had no outstanding debts, drug problems, or hidden enemies.

Their lives were peaceful and completely focused on each other.

The researchers were perplexed.

The absence of even the slightest indication of a motive meant the worst possible scenario for forensic science.

The young people were completely random targets of a brutal psychopath who was waiting for them in the forest.

However, this theory of randomness was completely shattered by the gruesome methodology of the crime.

The killer didn’t just grab the first hikers he saw on the mountain trail.

I had followed them carefully.

The answer to the question, why did they come to him, came unexpectedly during the questioning of Amanda Clark, L Rein’s closest friend.

On the third day of intense questioning, a tearful Amanda recalled a strange episode.

It happened at the end of September, exactly one month before the fatal trip.

According to Amanda, Lorin had been visiting a highly specialized exhibition of 19th-century medical and anatomical illustrations in downtown Portland.

I was looking for inspiration for a new design project.

That night he called Amanda and told her about a very unpleasant encounter.

While Lor Rein was looking at a drawing of the circulatory system, a stranger approached him.

According to his description, he was a middle-aged man wearing an expensive suit.

He didn’t try to flirt, but simply stood next to her and began to look intently at her face, almost without blinking.

Amanda told investigators verbatim what her missing friend had told her.

Lorrain said his heavy gaze left her physically cold.

He began to talk about perfect proportions, the golden ratio, and the absolute symmetry of the human body.

And then he took a step closer, looked her straight in the eyes and told her that the structure of her cheekbones had an absolutely perfect anatomical geometry .

Lor Rein was so frightened by that cold, clinical analysis of his appearance that he immediately left the gallery, thinking that the stranger was simply crazy.

He quickly forgot about the incident, but to the detectives in the interrogation room, these words sounded like a gunshot.

The puzzle instantly formed a single terrifying image.

The criminal’s psychological profile became crystal clear.

This monster was not seeking money or revenge.

He was a perverted collector.

His underground operating room was not just a torture chamber, but a horrifying workshop.

James and Lorra were not chosen by chance.

They had perfect physical parameters.

They became perfect specimens for a man who treated living people exclusively as rare biological material .

The unknown surgeon saw Lor Rein at the exhibition, appreciated her physical symmetry, and then presumably followed her home, waiting for months for the perfect moment to hunt her down.

The researchers realized they were facing a cold-blooded predator, whose logic went far beyond normal human understanding.

This criminal not only had medical knowledge, but also enormous patience.

And just as Detective Mitchell realized the full extent of this months-long planning, his office door burst open.

A breathless agent from the Financial Investigation Unit stood on the threshold clutching a recent bank printout .

He had found the man who had been secretly paying the registration fees for the dark van for years.

People’s eyes widened as the document was silently placed on the table.

A single name, printed in black and white, threatened to turn that criminal case into the biggest nightmare in the history of the State.

The document that the breathless financial agent placed on the paper-strewn desk in front of Detective Mitchell contained a single name, clearly printed in large black letters.

Elias Vans.

This name did not appear in any state’s active criminal databases, nor did it belong to any local criminal gang, nor to any known repeat offenders.

However, when the analysts entered it into the Oregon Federal Health Workers Registry, the computer system instantly generated an extensive file that left the researchers’ office in a tense, almost tangible, glacial silence.

Elias Vans, a 52- year-old man, was not just any doctor.

In his recent past he had been considered one of the most brilliant pathologists and outstanding forensic scientists on the entire Northwest Coast.

His career was on the rise, and he regularly published scientific articles in prestigious medical journals on cell degradation and methods to slow the inevitable breakdown of tissues.

This continued until a major medical scandal broke in 2008 .

The State Medical Board convened an emergency closed-door session and permanently revoked BANS’s license to practice medicine in the country.

The reason for this devastating professional collapse was the terrible results of an internal investigation at Portland’s central morgue.

It turned out that for several years Van had been systematically and completely illegally extracting tissue samples, rare organs, and bone parts from unidentified corpses.

homeless people , lonely victims of traffic accidents, and suicides whose bodies had never been claimed by any of their relatives.

Then, thanks to an army of incredibly expensive lawyers, he miraculously managed to avoid jail.

The defense team convinced the judges that the brilliant doctor was doing it solely for important scientific research, and the case was quietly hushed up, limited to a huge fine and a ban from approaching medical centers.

However, Vans’ former colleagues painted a completely different picture, one much darker for the researchers.

The detectives immediately turned to old interrogation records and contacted the former head of the central morgue, Dr.

Richard Stanton.

During the telephone conversation, the old doctor’s voice trembled visibly as he remembered his former subordinate.

According to Stanton, Van was a deep and incurable sociopath with a pronounced God complex.

The investigator recorded his testimony verbatim in the protocol.

He never treated the corpses on his tables as former human beings.

To him they were nothing more than biological material, a collection of parts.

Elijah was manically obsessed with the idea of physical immortality.

He often repeated offhand that nature had made a critical mistake in creating the aging process and that the human body could be perfectly preserved in a state of ultimate symmetry, stopping time forever.

We thought it was the strange philosophical musings of an eccentric.

How wrong we were.

With this disturbing psychological profile in hand, the research team began to painstakingly unravel the financial and asset life of the former forensic scientist after he disappeared from the public eye in 2008.

It turned out that immediately after his disgraceful dismissal, Vans received a huge inheritance from a distant relative.

The largest and most valuable asset of this inheritance was a huge, completely isolated plot of land, known locally as the Blackwood Estate.

Detective Mitchel opened a large topographic map of the Mount Hood National Forest that was on his desk and marked two specific points with a thick red marker.

The first was the abandoned Pinecrest Timbermill sawmill, where a sterile underground burial chamber containing the dismembered bodies of tourists was hidden.

The second point was the Blackwood estate, the distance separating it in a straight line through a dense and almost impenetrable coniferous forest was exactly 8 km.

It was exclusively his personal territory, his own private wilderness, where he knew every hidden path and every rock perfectly.

The detectives’ last doubts dissipated like morning mist when the finance department completed a full audit of all of BAN’s banking transactions over the past 5 years.

There was a reason why the former doctor lived secluded behind a high fence.

He regularly spent tens of thousands of dollars on specific purchases that could not be explained by the ordinary domestic needs of a rural resident.

All the checks were cleverly funneled through a chain of small shell companies, but now investigators could see a complete and crystal-clear picture of their activities.

Exactly two years ago, a high-power industrial gasoline generator was officially purchased in the name of Elias Van , exactly the same one that was in the adjacent compartment of the underground bunker and that reliably powered the tiled operating room.

A few months later he ordered a very expensive deep purification air filtration system, normally used only in closed laboratories with the highest levels of biological risk.

The final touch was the massive purchase of professional surgical lighting and two high-quality stainless steel sectional tables.

All these bulky items were delivered by a private transport company directly to the enormous wrought iron gates of the Blackwood mansion.

The circle of irrefutable circumstantial evidence was definitively and hermetically closed.

The unknown surgeon who had turned the wild forest into his personal, sterile torture chamber was no longer a faceless ghost hiding behind the tinted glass of a dark van.

It had a name, a very real face, and a precise geographical address.

He was a real person with a brilliant intellect, inexhaustible financial resources, and a completely distorted and perverse perception of human life.

Late in the afternoon, Detective Mitchell slowly rose from his desk, clutching the folder containing the search and arrest warrant recently issued by the judge.

In the long corridors of the police station, the heavy, rhythmic footsteps of dozens of members of the special tactical response team could already be heard .

They concentrated on checking their automatic weapons, loading their magazines, and silently putting on their heavy Kevlar bulletproof vests.

They all knew exactly where they were headed on this cold night, but none of them had any idea what exactly awaited them beyond the high fence of the impregnable Blackwood estate.

Nor whether the mad genius of anatomy had prepared his last and deadly trap for uninvited guests in the coal-black forest .

It’s 2 in the morning.

The darkness over the Mount Hood forest was so dense and heavy that it seemed almost physically tangible.

The special tactical response team, made up of 24 heavily armed elite soldiers, moved silently around the perimeter of the Blackwood estate.

The air temperature had dropped to 38º Fahrenheit, but the adrenaline in the agents’ blood made them completely oblivious to the penetrating cold of the mountain.

The high stone wall surrounding the five-acre private property resembled an impregnable medieval fortress.

The assault squad commander made special tactical gestures to order the start of the operation.

Heavy armored vehicles with their headlights off blocked the only possible route for retreat.

The soldiers used powerful hydraulic tools and in a matter of seconds, with a dull metallic crack, they knocked down the enormous wrought iron gate.

In complete silence, using modern night vision equipment , they approached the main entrance of the enormous Victorian house.

Detective Ray Mitchell, who was walking in the second row of the group, gripped his weapon tightly, bracing himself for the worst.

All the researchers expected fierce armed resistance or deadly traps, as they were about to take on a ruthless monster with nothing to lose.

At the precise moment, a heavy police battering rammed through the thick oak front door, shattering it into splinters.

Dozens of tactical flashlights instantly cut through the thick darkness inside the house.

The commandos stormed into the spacious lobby with loud shouts, pointing their assault rifles in all directions and blocking the corridors.

However, what they saw in the following seconds made them stop dead in their tracks, incredulous.

There was no armed resistance.

In a spacious and luxurious living room, barely illuminated by the irregular flames of the fireplace, Elias Vans sat in a deep and expensive leather armchair.

She was wearing a perfectly ironed maroon bathrobe.

The once brilliant forensic scientist and creator of the sterile underground death chamber seemed terrifyingly calm.

She slowly brought a fine porcelain cup of hot tea to her lips and took a small sip, her gaze fixed on the fire.

Body camera footage from the police, later included in the case file, clearly shows that Vans didn’t even flinch when more than a dozen red lace pointers were pointed at his chest and head.

She simply smiled gently .

Almost amicably, he gently placed his cup on the small table and slowly raised his hands.

I was expecting you, gentlemen.

They arrive a little late.

According to the official report from the capture team, those were his first words.

His voice was perfectly even.

While two burly men pushed him roughly against the parquet floor and placed heavy steel handcuffs on him , he offered no resistance and allowed himself to be led meekly out of the house in the middle of the cold night.

Meanwhile, a full search of the house was initiated.

Criminalists and agents from the federal office turned all the rooms upside down.

The true magnitude of the tragedy and the depth of the madness were revealed to them on the second floor, in Vans’ private studio .

Behind a cleverly concealed wooden panel, investigators found a large fireproof safe.

After opening it with a portable plasma cutter, they extracted thick folders and stacks of thick notebooks.

The folders contained extremely detailed architectural drawings of the same underground bunker, near the old sawmill, with calculations of ventilation and the thickness of the concrete floors.

But the contents of the notebooks were truly terrifying.

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