Good evening and welcome to Nighty Night with Robbie and Chadry. Bedtime stories to keep you

awake. I'm TJ Lubel, the shows producer. Tonight's story is a tale of revenge so frightening

it might scare you stiff. Please enjoy half dead.

Once upon a time, I had a love that burned bright. I had a love that cut away the rot in my soul,

found what was good there and tended to it. I had a love I thought would last forever,

even if that forever had to be spent in secret. Before months ago, Evan McDougall took that love

away from me, and now all I have is revenge. It was a sunny morning on the day of the hearing

which is strange. October in this part of the South is usually full of rain. It should be storming,

I thought as I got dressed. The sky should be screaming like I wanted to scream. Instead the only

screaming came from the grackles crowding the power lines around downtown. The good weather

meant there were more than a few onlookers crowding the courtroom steps in addition to the few

local news teams on the scene. The story wasn't splashy enough to go viral, but in our small college

town, the son of a dean, possibly facing murder charges, made big waves. You couldn't step into

a coffee shop or sit in office hours or buy tampons at the CVS without hearing the name Evan McDougall,

accompanied by a declaration of shock or outrage. The last time a story this big hit the town was

when a category 4 storm took the top half of the city in 2003. I remember hiding that night with

my little sister, two girls in a bathtub, a mattress flopped over us, breathing in her two sweet

serial breath and wondering if we were going to die. I promised God that if he let me and my sister

and my parents and my cat live through this, that I would try to be a good person for as long

as I lived. And growing up, I mostly kept that promise. That is, until Evan McDougall came into my life.

Here's what I know to be true about the night the Cassie died, pieced together over several

months while I waited to see if there would be charges. The party was at an apartment a few blocks

...