On the morning of March 4th, 1994, Decatur Illinois got the kind of call that sounds routine for about 10 seconds. A fire.

Smoke coming from a house at 129 North West Lawn Avenue on the city's west side, not far from Fairview Park.

A hair-in-review newspaper carrier spotted at first.

It was early, dark, quiet, the kind of hour when most of Decatur was still asleep, when the

streets set empty, when porch lights glow against cold windows, and when a fire truck rolling through the neighborhood

feels like the worst thing that could be coming. But the fire was not the worst thing. The fire

was the cover. Inside that house, firefighters found three people dead. 37-year-old Kathy Campbell,

her 16-year-old daughter Michelle Campbell, known to her friends as

Shelly, and 29-year-old Timothy McCormick, Kathy's boyfriend from Allenville in Moultry County.

The flames had not killed them. The fire had been set after the violence was already done.

Kathy and Michelle had been stabbed. Timothy McCormick had been shot. All three had been bound.

Police would later say there was no evidence of a struggle. No sign that anyone inside that house had been given a fair chance to fight back.

And threaded through all of it was one name Kathy Campbell had already put on a paper.

James David Dyer.

Thirty-four years old?

A man she feared.

A man she had gone to court to keep away from her.

A man who, according to her own words in a protection order, had already come into her home with a baseball bat and a knife.

A man who allegedly told her the next person to enter the house was dead, and then he would kill her.

This is American Dread, two stories of tragedy and terror from the dark side of American Heartland.

I'm your host Adam White.

American Dread is part of the American Hauntings podcast Network. Today, we're going back to Decatur, Illinois, March of 1994,

...