A frail woman broke a Saginaw Man's front window with a metal pipe on a March afternoon,

and what she told the responding officers led police to a locked door in a nearby basement.

I'm Darren Marler, and this is Weird Dark News, the latest stories of true crime, the

paranormal, and all things strange and macab coming from my blog at weirddarkness.com slash

news, where I post even more stories that never make it to the podcast.

Coltinello heard glass break in his front room on the afternoon of March 15, 2026.

When he reached the doorway, a woman was standing inside his house, surrounded by the broken

pieces of his window.

She was holding a metal pipe.

She was thin enough that Ellow thought she might be in her late 70s.

The first thing she said to him

was that he needed to call the cops. He called. Officers from the Saginaw Police Department

reached the 1600 block of Gilbert Street a little after two in the afternoon. The dispatcher

had logged the call as vandalism, broken window, suspect still on scene. Officers expected to find someone

disoriented or intoxicated. They found a 58-year-old woman who could barely hold herself

upright, and who told them the window was the only way she could think of to make someone

call the police. She had escaped, she said, from the basement of a house nearby where she had

been kept for about two years. The officers radioed for an ambulance. While they waited,

the woman told them where the house was. It was a short walk. Detective Sergeant Jeff Dowd

of the Saginaw Police Department later described the basement to reporters

from M Live. There was a mattress on the concrete floor. There was a radio nearby, and the radio

was playing. There was a five-gallon bucket the woman had been using because there was no bathroom

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