It was cold in there , so the foreman decided to turn on the heat.

There was an old gas convector in one corner of the room, powered by a propane tank.

Woods lit the burner, made sure there was a blue flame, and told the girls he was going to work in the workshop so as not to disturb their rest.

He promised to return when it stopped raining to take them to a motel.

At that moment, an irreparable mistake was made.

Woods admitted to investigators that he had not turned on the heat since last winter.

I had not checked the condition of the chimney that went outside through the wall.

During the summer, the birds had built a dense nest of branches, feathers and dirt in the chimney, completely blocking the exit of the combustion products.

Guts went to the main workshop and turned on the woodworking machines.

The roar of the circular saws and the noise of the sawdust extractor created an acoustic barrier that completely isolated him from the break room.

He worked without hearing anything but the mechanical hum.

Meanwhile, in the next room, a silent tragedy was taking place.

Due to a clogged chimney, the invisible, odorless, and colorless carbon monoxide did not escape to the outside, but instead accumulated inside the small room.

The concentration of carbon monoxide increased every minute.

Valentina and Luis, tired after a long walk and warmed by the heat, probably felt pleasantly sleepy.

This is an insidious feature of carbon monoxide poisoning.

The victim does not feel suffocation or panic, she simply falls asleep.

The girls sat on the sofa, leaned against each other, and closed their eyes, thinking they would take a nap for a few minutes until it stopped raining.

Il Woods returned to the recreation room about two hours later, when the downpour began to subside.

I wanted to tell the girls that it was safe to leave.

When he opened the door, he saw a peaceful scene.

The sisters were sitting on the sofa with their heads together as if they were fast asleep.

The room was stuffy and hot.

Woods called them, but got no answer.

He approached and lightly touched one of the girls on the shoulder, whose head shook listlessly.

At that moment, the old master felt pierced by terror.

He tried to feel their pulses, but both girls’ hearts were silent.

The girls’ skin had an unnatural pinkish tint , a classic sign of carbon monoxide poisoning that Woods knew from his security training.

His eyes shifted to the gas heater that was still whirring softly, filling the room with death.

He rushed towards the pipe, ripped it out, and saw a thick cork shaped like a bird’s nest.

The realization of the truth hit him harder than any words.

In his study, on his sofa, there were two corpses.

Two young women who had their whole lives ahead of them had died because of his negligence, because of his old and faulty heater.

She stood in the middle of the room, staring at the motionless bodies, and felt the ground slipping away from her feet.

At that moment, scenarios of the future began to flash through his mind: police, court, homicide charges, prison.

For that lonely old man, it meant the end of his life.

Fear of prison supplanted common sense and conscience.

He did not call 911.

He did not attempt CPR when he realized it was too late.

Instead, his brain, clouded by panic, began frantically searching for a way to get rid of the evidence.

He looked at the enormous industrial tubs in the workshop where the heated wood impregnation mixture was steaming, and a crazy plan was born in his mind that was supposed to cover up the accident, but instead turned him into a monster in the eyes of the world.

Panic is the worst advisor, especially when you are faced with the corpses of two people whose lives were cut short because of you.

On that fateful night of September 14, 2012, Ilah Woods ceased to be just a tired carpenter and became a criminal trying to rewrite reality.

In his mind, clouded by the fear of prison, a distorted logic emerged .

If there are no bodies, there is no crime.

And if the corpses were unidentifiable, no one could link them to his study.

He was certain that the death of two young women, caused by a faulty heater, would put him, a lonely 64-year-old man, behind bars for the rest of his life.

This thought was the trigger that unleashed a chain of horrific events.

Woods decided that he had to hide the victims’ identities at all costs.

His eyes fell upon the industrial bathtubs in which a heated mixture of technical paraffin and rosin was steaming.

It was an ideal substance for preservation that, when hardened, formed a hard, opaque shell.

In a state of being affected, acting in a fog, he began to put his crazy plan into practice.

He understood that baths had a limited volume, so the bodies had to be made as compact as possible.

It was fear and the physical limitations of the tanks, not mystical rituals, that dictated the horrific poses that would later shock the world.

All the girls were tied up with ropes, their knees pressed against their chests so they would fit in the tanks.

Then, using a workshop crane, he lowered the bodies one by one into the hot, viscous liquid.

The bodies sank slowly to the bottom of the deep metal vats.

It was there at the bottom, under the pressure of the dense mass, where they finally froze in that unnatural fetal position that forensic experts would later mistakenly attribute to the fantasies of religious fanatics.

Woods left them there for several hours until the paraffin began to thicken, turning the human remains into shapeless blocks of wax.

When he took them out again, he was no longer looking at Valentina and Luis, but at two horrible yellowish buds.

And then he faced a new problem that he had not foreseen in his panic.

Those rocks were incredibly heavy and hard.

Burying them in the rocky soil of the Appalachians was impossible; it would take days and would certainly attract attention.

Burning them would also be impossible without a huge bonfire that could be seen for miles around.

That’s when he came up with the idea of ​​staging a reenactment.

He remembered the newspaper headlines about strange cults and decided to play with people’s superstitions.

If the police found corpses arranged as ritual sacrifices, they would be looking for mythical occultists, not checking local carpentry shops.

He wanted to deflect suspicion from the accident by turning it into a mystical thriller.

Using the winch on his pickup truck, he loaded the heavy rocks onto the back of the truck.

The night was dark and the rain was washing away the tire tracks.

Woods drove his terrible load to the foot of the Devil’s Pulpit Rock.

It was a remote and perfect location for their performance.

Using a system of cables and blocks that he used to employ to lift logs on slopes, the old master dragged the bodies to the stone plateau with an inhuman effort.

There he carelessly threw them into the center and began placing stones and branches around them , imitating signs he had once seen in cheap horror movies .

He was creating a stage set for a crime that didn’t exist, to hide a crime that had occurred due to negligence.

After finishing his work before dawn, he returned home, destroyed the girls’ clothes and belongings in the oven, and tried to go on living as if nothing had happened.

He hoped the forest would hide its secret forever or that the sacrifice would frighten people so much that they wouldn’t even go near that place, but he was wrong.

The truth, like bodies preserved in paraffin, was preserved, but not destroyed.

The trial of Elaya Woods was brief and lacked the mystical aura that the press had attributed to the case.

The jury did not see a cult leader, but a frightened old man whose cowardice led him to desecrate the bodies of the dead.

The court took into account all the circumstances: the involuntary nature of the girls’ deaths, the absence of any signs of violence on the bodies before they were submerged in paraffin, but also the cynicism of the accused’s actions after the tragedy.

The verdict was harsh.

Ilayah Woods was found guilty of two counts of manslaughter and concealment of evidence of a felony.

The judge, in reading the sentence, pointed out that if Woods had simply called 911 that night, he would probably have received a suspended sentence or a minimum sentence for breaching safety regulations, but his attempt to rewrite the script of his death cost him his freedom.

Woods was sentenced to 30 years in a maximum security prison, with no parole for the first 15 years.

Given his age, this effectively meant a life sentence.

He died in the prison hospital 4 years after his conviction, taking to the grave the weight of guilt for two lives senselessly cut short .

The Devil’s Pulpit Rock in the Nantajala Forest is empty.

Rain and wind have eroded the stone circles and the wax traces have disappeared under a new layer of moss.

But for the locals, this place has remained cursed forever.

Tourists avoid it, and forest rangers passing by inadvertently glance at the summit, where the wax maidens lay for two years.

This story became a cruel reminder that sometimes the greatest evil is not hidden in mystical rituals or ancestral curses, but in ordinary human fear that drives us to do things more terrible than any fiction.

Sometimes a monster is not someone who prays to dark gods, but someone who is simply afraid of responsibility.

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