Good evening, and welcome back to Nighty Night with Robbie Achadri. Bedtime stories to keep you awake.

I'm DJ Lubel, the show's producer. Tonight's tale is about a writer who, let's just say, gets a little too involved in their story. Please enjoy Bridgewater Triangle.

I get there late, like I always do. Like it's almost part of the job. Not only because it's a drive from the city, but because that's the thing with stories.

It's hard to write them as they happen. Impossible, of course, to write them before they happen, despite what people might tell you. That's certainly the case with crime stories. If we knew the crime before it happened, we would stop it, or at least I'd like to think so. I'd like to think we wouldn't just wait for the story.

So, because I'm driving from the city, and also because that's how stories work, I get to the crime scene late, and it's mostly washed away. Mostly, but not entirely. That's the thing about cops. There was always something they left behind.

I had to piece together what happened in my head after the fact, but they've left me a pretty clear picture. So much so that I may have hardly needed the police radio I keep in my car.

I now look that there are app versions of it on your phone, which I also have, but the one in the car just makes everything feel more appropriate.

The scene that I slosh my way into in the free townfall, River State Forest, seems like the leftover from a slasher film set. The rain has washed away most, but not all of the evidence.

Certain crimes leave such hard fingerprints on the world that, oh, nothing can wash them away. What I see are the remnants of some sort of ritualistic sacrifice.

Serpentine symbols carved into trees and stones. Their curves unfamiliar, different from the jagged runes I expected.

There are stick figures hanging from the branches above my head, and brush cleared away to make room for a crowd. A stump in the middle that seems to me an awful lot like a podium. Signs of something massive being dragged through the space.

What isn't present is what I overheard on the police radio. Two people strung up before the two trees in front of me, hung upside down so they looked like inverted wise.

There's still a little bit of rope left on a northernmost tree, and I wonder if some true crime junkie will be out here someday, find it, know it's from this moment this time, and this crime.

I know it's part of my job, it's been for a long time, but I still have trouble picturing the two kids who are killed out here.

Kids, I say that because everyone seems like a kid to me at this age, but they're in their mid-twenties, or at least they were in their mid-twenties. They'll forever be in their mid-twenties.

So maybe that label still applies. Daniel Robuck and Kathleen McKenzie had their entire lives ahead of them.

Not that it would be any less tragic if a senior citizen had been strung up there, but we're taught to value youth, you know, in a sense. The loss of the possibility of years decades ahead of them.

It seems now that Danielle and Kathleen are destined to be just a couple of splashy headlines before people move on to the next tragedy that will inevitably come into their lives.

Maybe I'll cover that one too. I have a couple words for my own headline bouncing around in my head. I just don't know how they'll fit together.

Devil, slasher, swamp. Maybe cult or copycats since just seemed reminiscent of some other murders that happened here a couple decades ago. There's something in there.

The idea of something being cyclical, of recurrence. Some horror shedding its skin and being worn and new. I'm just not sure what. I wanted to be something that'll stir up horror, really make people aghast at what's happened here.

But frankly, that's been harder and harder in recent years. You know what I mean. There are tragedies everywhere, every day. Just like I said before, we're constantly inundated with them.

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