Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence and is not intended for all audiences.

Listener discretion is advised.

Unfortunately, you're right in the middle of all of this.

And to sit here and live to us to begin with, it is not helping you at all.

This is a friend of yours or was a friend of yours and somebody brutally murdered how they know.

Hello and welcome to Season 13, episode 350 of Sword and Scale.

A show that reveals that the worst monsters are real. Yeah. The

The The

The Simpsonville, South Carolina is a small southern town, where life moves at an easy pace. Families know their neighbors. Church bells still mark the hour, and the peaceful

atmosphere feels almost rehearsed. But on the afternoon of October 26, 2016, the calm was broken.

Inside a cramped interview room at the Simpsonville Police Department,

investigators spoke to a young man named Ricky Hargrove.

I want to tell you what you've effectively done, Ricky,

is you inserted yourself into a murder investigation.

I mean, what do you think? I think who would do something like that?

Take some kind of monster to do something like that to someone.

This interview with Ricky was one of the first threads in an investigation that would span

nearly a decade. It was a horrific homicide case that centered around a 22-year-old woman named Katie Blavel.

Katie believed she could build a simple life for herself in Simpsonville and was doing what she could do

to make that happen.

Katie was an animal lover, and in 2016, she was working full-time at her local

PetSmart.

...