On October 27th, 2015, at 15 hours and 40 minutes, the Arizona desert revealed one of its most terrible secrets.

In a narrow sunsheltered creasse south of Waterhole Canyon, where a group of five geologists had accidentally descended, a heavy, sickening smell of decay rained.

40 ft down among the blank sandstone walls.

The students found a 44year-old detective, Robert Dixon, who had disappeared without a trace exactly 18 days earlier.

He had not called for help or tried to escape.

Exhausted to the point of exhaustion, covered with blisters from burns, the policeman was crouching in the semi darkness and monotonously interrogating the mutilated corpse in a broken voice.

The dead man was silent, but this did not stop Robert.

He continued to demand a confession from his dead double on whom someone had carefully thrown his own service jacket.

October of 2015 turned out to be abnormally hot in Arizona, turning the desert into a real hot furnace.

Thermometers in the shade were steadily hovering around 110° F, and the dry wind brought no relief, blowing clouds of red dust into the air.

44year-old detective Robert Dixon, a quiet and focused police veteran whose career has been inextricably linked to solving the most difficult of hopeless cases, has arrived in the provincial town of Paige to work on his own unofficial investigation.

According to documents found later in his office, he was trying to find a hidden connection between a series of old disappearances of lone hikers and one new case that had not yet been released to the press.

Dixon was deeply convinced that the local canyons were hiding something much more terrible than just tragic accidents during hiking trips.

The chronology of his last days was restored by investigators literally bit by bit.

On October 8th at 25:00, Robert checked into an inexpensive roadside motel during the official interrogation.

The administrator of the establishment noted that the policeman looked extremely exhausted but extremely focused.

According to the witness, Dixon spent most of the evening in his room spreading out topographic maps on the bed.

The next morning, on October 9th, at 6:00 30 minutes, outdoor video surveillance cameras at a local gas station recorded his last appearance.

The video clearly shows the detective buying two gallons of drinking water, a detailed map, energy bars, and spare batteries.

He was completely alone, wearing a light sand jacket and desert boots.

At 7:00 sharp, his heavy dark blue SUV crossed the invisible border of the Navajo reservation and headed southeast on Highway 98.

According to official cell phone billing records, the last time his satellite phone signal was detected by a base station near the southern entrance to Antelopee Canyon was the last time it was picked up.

This electronic trail was cut off at exactly 9:00, 45 minutes in the morning.

After that second, the detective seemed to disappear into the hot desert fog.

There was no call or message from him.

His sudden silence was the first warning sign.

When Robert failed to make scheduled contact after 24 hours, the Cookanino County Sheriff’s Department, together with armed Navajo Police patrols, launched a large-scale search operation on October 10th at 12 noon.

That same day, at 16 hours and 30 minutes, a patrol helicopter crew spotted a familiar dark blue body among the rocks.

Dixon’s vehicle was found abandoned in a dirt lot near an old dried up stream bed 15 miles off the highway.

A forensic team that arrived at the scene at 17:00 recorded a gruesome scene.

The car was unlocked.

The ignition keys were inside on the driver’s seat.

A wallet with credit cards and cash was left on the passenger seat and a service weapon was in the glove compartment.

Everything looked as if an experienced detective had stopped, got out to look around for just one minute, and planned to return.

However, the door was half open, and the experts found absolutely no foreign fingerprints on the plastic of the dashboard and steering wheel.

There were also no signs of a struggle or blood.

From the car, the search spread over an area of more than 50 square miles.

Volunteers and rescuers lined up in long chains.

Professional dog handlers with dogs combed the red sands and sharp rocky slopes meter by meter.

Helicopters with thermal imagers circled the slotted canyons around the clock.

But the giant sandstone maze remained completely silent.

Robert’s tracks, which the dogs confidently picked up from the SUV, suddenly broke off on a rock face just one mile from the car.

According to the chief dog handlers report, the animals would reach a certain point, start circling in confusion and whimpering miserably, finally losing the human scent.

The large-scale rescue operation lasted for 14 long days.

The hope of finding the policeman alive was inexurably melting away under the desert sun.

The water supplies he could have taken with him would have lasted for a maximum of 3 days.

Over time, the intensity of the search began to naturally decrease.

The authorities were preparing papers to transfer the case to the inactive category, and the local press began to publish restrained obituaries.

But on October 24th, at 18 hours 40 minutes, a volunteer rescuer who was exploring a deep, gloomy ravine 3 mi north of the abandoned SUV on his own made a gruesome discovery.

This single detail instantly put to rest all theories of an accident.

On a sharp rock ledge hung a neatly cut, not torn, but cut with a sharp blade piece of fabric from Robert’s tactical shirt.

And just below it, in the dry sand, a fresh print of a heavy military boot was clearly visible.

This print was definitely not Dixon’s.

The trail had been left quite recently, and it led directly to the narrow entrance to a dark, unmapped cave from the depths of which there was a grave cold.

On October 27th, 2015, exactly 18 difficult days after the detective’s official disappearance, the search operation was being wound down.

However, the desert has its own laws of debt repayment.

That morning, a scientific expedition consisting of five geology students from Northern Arizona University under the guidance of a supervisor was conducting routine research on tectonic landslides.

Their route was 2 miles south of the popular water hole Canyon.

It was a completely wild, unmarked area where the red sandstone formed a deadly maze of deep cracks and chasms.

At 14 hours and 15 minutes, the group deviated significantly from the planned course, becoming interested in an unusual geological formation.

According to the later testimony of the group’s leader, Mark Jenkins, at 14 hours and 40 minutes, they approached a narrow, barely visible creasse.

Its width on the surface was no more than 3 ft.

Sunlight penetrated it only for 2 hours a day when the sun was directly at its zenith, leaving the bottom in a constant, eerie twilight.

It was there, standing on the edge of the abyss, that the geologists felt it.

The heavy, sweet, nauseiating smell of biological decomposition rose from the depths along with the cold air.

At 15:00, exactly three students equipped with safety ropes began a slow descent down a natural stone staircase.

The descent to a depth of 40 ft took 10 minutes.

What they saw at the bottom of this blind stone sack was forever etched in their memories and later became the basis of one of the most terrifying police reports in the history of the state.

The temperature downstairs had plummeted.

The walls were damp and the air was so stale that it was hard to breathe.

In the farthest corner of the dark cave, sitting on the cold sand, was Robert Dixon.

His physical condition was terrifying.

The once robust 44year-old man was exhausted to the point of exhaustion.

His skin, unprotected from those short but merciless hours of direct sun, was covered with terrible burns and blisters.

His lips were cracked to deep bloody wounds and his eyes were deeply sunken.

However, the most frightening thing was not his appearance, but what the missing detective was doing in this stone grave.

Directly opposite him, casually leaning against the sandstone wall, was a corpse.

The body was in a deep stage of decomposition, but the killer had carefully prepared this scene.

Robert’s service jacket was neatly buttoned up.

Around his half rotten neck hung Dixon’s police badge, which reflected dimly in the rays of the student street lights, and the detective’s personal watch was fixed on his bare wrist.

The corpse’s face had been mutilated beyond recognition.

The skin and muscles had been methodically cut away, leaving only a bare skull with empty eye sockets.

Robert Dixon did not notice the rescuers.

He was rocking rhythmically from side to side, clutching a piece of black coal in his trembling, bloody fingers.

The entire wall around him was covered with chaotic markings, mathematical formulas, and endless rows of vertical lines.

According to the audio recording that one of the students, paralyzed with terror, instinctively managed to make on his phone at 15 minutes 12, the detective was conducting an official protocol interrogation.

His voice turned into an eerie, broken rasp.

He was looking directly into the empty sockets of the corpse and repeating the same phrases monotonously over and over again.

Every word is clearly audible from the audio recording.

Name: Robert Dixon.

Date of birth.

Why are you hiding the evidence, Robert? Answer the detective.

Look at yourself.

You’re dead, Robert.

Just admit it for the record.

The broken mind of the policeman was absolutely convinced that he was sitting in front of his own corpse and trying to get a confession out of him.

The students began to slowly retreat to the ropes, afraid to make an extra movement.

One of them took out a walkie-talkie with trembling hands to send an alarm to the surface.

But at that very moment, the beam of his flashlight slid behind the dead man’s back.

There, in the pitch darkness of the narrow tunnel, where no light could reach, a dry metal click suddenly sounded, followed immediately by a quiet, rhythmic mechanical humming, as if someone had just activated hidden equipment.

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Now, let’s get back to the tense events in the red sands of Arizona.

Detective Robert Dixon’s evacuation began immediately as soon as the geologists sounded the alarm.

At 16 hours and 30 minutes, a rescue helicopter brought him on board and immediately transported him to Flagstaff Medical Center.

The medical report drawn up by the doctor on duty in the emergency room immediately after the arrival of the helicopter recorded the patients terrible condition.

Robert was in a state of deep delirium.

His consciousness was completely detached from reality and his eyes wandered around the emptiness of the hospital room.

After the initial examination, doctors diagnosed critical dehydration which had already led to acute renal failure as well as the most severe degree of reactive psychosis.

The physical exhaustion was so severe that the resuscitators had to fight for every minute of his life, connecting the policemen to life support systems.

However, the real shock awaited the investigators after receiving the detailed results of the blood toxicology test, which was ready at 18:00 sharp.

According to the official laboratory report, the detective’s body contained a consistently high concentration of scopalamine and dope alkaloids, some of the most powerful natural hallucinogens that grow wild in this desert area.

The conclusion of the chief toxicologist was unequivocal.

Someone had systematically and very subtly poisoned the policeman.

The criminal was methodically destroying his will, memory, and ability to perceive reality adequately, turning a strong, analytical mind into a defenseless target for his own sadistic manipulations.

Meanwhile, while intensive care doctors were trying to bring Robert back to life, the forensic team at the Cookino County morg took up the remains recovered from the same stone sack.

Thanks to DNA samples obtained from the dead man’s bone marrow, genetic testing provided a very clear answer that shattered the detective’s mad delusion forever.

The corpse had absolutely nothing to do with Robert Dixon.

The database identified the remains as Michael Torres, an ordinary tourist who had been officially reported missing in the same area exactly 14 months earlier.

The detailed description of the body in the pathologist’s report made even the most experienced homicide detectives shudder.

The killer had acted with surgical precision and incredible cold-blooded cruelty.

He deliberately cut the skin from the victim’s face, completely destroying any individual features and then methodically dressed the corpse in Dixon’s personal belongings.

It was not just a way to hide the dead man’s identity from identification.

It was a key part of a diabolical theatrical prop.

The criminal’s plan was horrifying in its cold sophistication.

Analyzing the configuration of the stone trap, investigators realized the full extent of the unknown architect’s sadism.

The plan was to lock the drugged person in a dark pit with the corpse, depriving him of any external reference points.

In this absolute vacuum, the criminal methodically, using a speaker hidden in the rock, inspired the detective with only one thought, that he was dead.

that his life ended at the bottom of the canyon and that his own rotting body was sitting right in front of him demanding a protocol confession.

The symbolic stone grave became an ideal laboratory for the complete destruction of the human mind where the victim had to believe in his own death and go crazy from the impossibility of escaping from this personal hell.

However, when the forensic experts began to dismantle the equipment from the cave wall to include it as material evidence, one of the technicians noticed a thin optical cable behind it.

It led deep into the bowels of the rock, and at its end, a red microtransmitter diode was flashing continuously, which meant only one thing.

They were still being watched live all this time.

Gemini’s response.

While Robert Dixon’s heart was beating desperately in an erratic rhythm to the incessant beeping of medical monitors in the intensive care unit, the investigation of his case was handed over to his colleagues from the homicide department.

The detective was in a state of deep medically induced sleep.

His body occasionally shuddered with sudden convulsions while doctors tried to remove a critical dose of powerful desert hallucinagens from his body.

Realizing that the keys to unraveling this nightmare lay not in the hospital room, but in Dixon’s own workpapers, the task force began a detailed reconstruction of his last weeks.

On October 28th at 9:00 in the morning, investigators with an official search warrant entered room 13 in a cheap roadside motel called the Desert Star.

It was where Robert had rented a room for the duration of his unofficial investigation.

According to the initial report of the scene inspection, the room looked completely empty and sterile.

The bed was perfectly made.

Personal belongings were neatly folded in the closet and there was not a single scrap of paper on the desk.

It seemed that the detective had left no clues behind.

However, experienced forensic scientists were well aware of their senior colleagues working methods.

He belonged to the old paranoid school and never kept important evidence in plain sight.

11:00 45 minutes became a turning point for the entire investigation.

One of the technicians, methodically inspecting the room inch by inch, noticed a standard ventilation grill near the ceiling about 9 ft off the floor.

One of the four metal screws holding the panel in place was not fully tightened, and fresh scratches glistened on its threads under the flashlight.

Carefully dismantling the metal grill, the operative peered into the dark, dusty channel.

There, deep inside, was a thick leather folder tightly wrapped with duct tape.

What the police found inside this makeshift cache forced them to completely reconsider the scale of the crime and the psychological profile of the suspect.

It wasn’t just a collection of police reports, but a real archive of madness that Robert had been methodically collecting over the past few months.

The folder contained dozens of yellowed extracts from old land registers dating back to the 70s of the last century.

But the most valuable find was detailed architectural plans and largecale geodetic maps.

Each drawing clearly bore the official seal of the local mapping company, Canyon Edge Surveying.

Studying these maps, the investigators finally realized where the trail led.

According to Dixon’s extensive notes left in the margins in red ink, he had come across an unprecedented serial kidnapper.

This criminal was strikingly different from typical maniacs who are guided by chaotic impulses.

The unknown was a methodical and incredibly patient researcher.

A true architect of other people’s pain.

He didn’t just kill people.

He conducted long, sophisticated, sadistic experiments on them.

The maniac deliberately used deep natural caves and long abandoned copper mines on the lands of the Navajo Indians as his personal underground laboratory.

The case file made it absolutely clear that the offender had deep engineering knowledge.

He carefully transformed these underground spaces into perfectly isolated chambers of sensory deprivation.

Robert was able to unravel the eerie system by which the maniac chose his locations.

Each circled point on the map was located at the intersection of specific geological faults where a massive sandstone layer guaranteed absolute soundproofing.

The criminal took into account the acoustics and the complete lack of natural light at a depth of tens of feet underground.

The locations were chosen many miles away from popular tourist routes, making their accidental discovery absolutely impossible.

The found archive fully explained the events of that fateful day when the detective went missing.

On one of the last maps Dixon had opened, he had circled a new coordinate with a bold marker near the southern entrance to the famous canyon.

A short note was hastily left next to it.

New camera.

He is preparing it right now.

Realizing that every hour lost could cost a human life, Robert decided to be proactive.

According to phone company records, he tried to call the sheriff’s office at 6:00 in the morning on October 9th, but the line was not answered.

Without waiting for official reinforcements, Dixon went to the location on his own, planning only to conduct a covert reconnaissance of the area.

This decision was fatal for him.

While the operatives were silently sorting through this gruesome evidence, spreading it out on the bed in the motel room, they discovered another item wrapped in a transparent file at the very bottom of the leather folder.

It was a copy of a receipt from a local hardware store for the purchase of specific soundproofing material and expensive electronic locks.

The check was written in the name of a man whom many in the police department knew by sight.

But when the chief investigator turned the sheet over to look at the back, the room instantly fell into a dead, oppressive silence.

Attached to the paper was a fresh photograph of a young woman taken with a hidden lens on a street in the city of Paige.

And over her smiling face in the maniac’s sweeping handwriting was written only one word that made all the detectives present feel cold.

A whole month of grueling struggle for the detective’s mind and body passed.

Only at the end of November 2015 did Robert Dixon’s consciousness begin to emerge from the dark depths of a medically induced sleep.

Doctors performed a real miracle, cleansing his blood of a deadly mixture of poisons.

However, the devastating effects of being in a stone sack left deep scars on his psyche.

According to his medical records, severe panic attacks and vivid flashbacks became his constant companions.

The slightest sharp rustle in the corridor or a sudden light out in the ward caused him to have bouts of uncontrollable terror.

When investigators were first allowed to see him for questioning on November 25th at 14:00, Robert looked like a pale shadow of his former self.

However, his professional instincts were stronger than his fear.

Turning on the police recorder, the senior investigator asked the detective to tell him in detail everything he remembered.

Breaking down in a huff, Dixon began to reconstruct his own abduction for the official record.

The testimony allowed the police to fill in the last white spots of that fateful day.

He described his route on October 9th in every detail.

According to Robert, at 11:00 45 in the morning, he was cautiously moving along a very narrow path along a steep slope.

The heat reached 110° F.

The detective stopped at the edge of the cliff to check his compass, and it was at that moment that he felt a sharp, paralyzing electric shock between his shoulder blades.

The attacker acted completely silently using a powerful stun gun from a distance of only a few feet.

All Robert could remember was a blinding flash of pain, instant muscle paralysis, and his body falling to the hot sand.

The last fragment of his memory before he lost consciousness was the sound of heavy boots and a rough tarpolin bag being pulled tightly over his head.

The next fragment of his memory began in the absolute darkness of the dungeon.

Robert told the investigators how he woke up from the piercing cold on the hard stone floor.

When he tried to move, he was horrified to realize that his right leg was securely chained with a thick steel chain to a metal ring in the sandstone wall.

The chain was no more than 10 ft long.

In this total darkness, he accidentally felt a cold corpse next to him.

But at that time, he did not realize how mutilated the body was.

The main instrument of torture in this hell was ordinary thirst.

A thin metal pipe came down from the ceiling through which an unknown captor supplied a small portion of water only twice a day.

But each drop of this liquid was generously saturated with extremely high doses of scopalamine and a toxic extract from desert dope.

The drug acted slowly, dissolving the boundaries of reality and plunging the detective into a state of unending nightmare.

The most terrifying part of the testimony was the detailed description of the psychological breakdown.

According to the audio recording of the interrogation, a few days after the abduction, a distorted mechanical voice suddenly came from a speaker hidden high in the rock.

For hours, with ruthless, methodical monotony, it read Robert, his own police file.

The mechanical voice called out the names of his family, listed old closed cases, and drop by drop convinced the detective that he had, in fact, tragically died in a fall into a deep canyon.

The invisible executioner claimed that Dixon’s earthly life was finally over, and now his soul was stuck in purgatory.

The voice continuously insisted that the corpse next to him was the dead body of Robert himself.

In order to get to heaven, the detective had to conduct his last interrogation in his life and beat a confession out of his own dead body.

Absolute isolation, darkness, and roundthe-clock exposure to hallucinogens eventually did their dirty work.

Robert admitted to his colleagues that at some point his exhausted mind simply gave up to somehow survive in the conditions of total sensory deprivation.

His psyche voluntarily accepted the imposed rules of the game.

But at the end of an hour-ong conversation with the investigators, when the nurse on duty had already entered the room with a syringe of sedatives, Robert suddenly lunged forward and grabbed his partner’s wrist.

His eyes widened unnaturally.

He remembered one critical moment that the drugs had almost erased from his memory.

On the last day, a few hours before the geologists found the fissure, the mechanical filter on the loudspeaker suddenly broke.

For a brief split second, Robert heard in the background the real, completely undistorted voice of his tormentor, who was shouting at someone else in frustration.

And the worst part was that Dixon knew exactly who that voice belonged to because he had heard it hundreds of times in the corridors of his own police station.

Detective Robert Dixon’s testimony and the irrefutable physical evidence found behind the motel’s air vent finally allowed investigators to break through the wall of obscurity.

An invoice from a local hardware store for specific acoustic materials and a familiar voice Robert recognized became the keys that open the door to the darkest secrets of the local community.

By the end of November, a joint task force of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Arizona State Police had officially focused all their attention on a 38-year-old local man named Todd Williams.

The man’s life story read like a perfect guide for criminal profilers studying the formation of serial criminals.

Todd was once considered one of the best specialists in the region.

He had years of impeccable service in an elite mountain search and rescue unit, after which he took a job as a senior extreme tourism instructor for a well-known travel company.

He knew the geology, acoustics, and topography of the endless red wastelands perfectly at the level of predator instincts.

However, his brilliant career came to an abrupt end 5 years ago due to a loud and extremely strange scandal, the materials of which detectives were now carefully studying in police archives.

According to internal travel agency reports attached to the new criminal case, Williams was fired with a wolf’s ticket for systematically exposing unprepared clients to deadly psychological danger.

Todd’s former supervisor said during a formal interrogation on the record that the instructor had an unhealthy tendency to take groups far from approved safe routes.

During one of his hikes, he led a group of six into deep unmapped caves.

There, more than 200 feet underground, he deliberately turned off all light sources and disappeared, leaving the group in complete, suffocating darkness for six long hours.

At the disciplinary hearing, Williams calmly justified his actions by saying that he was conducting experimental spiritual cleansing sessions out of primal fear.

He convinced the commission that only when a person is on the verge of absolute madness can he or she drop social masks.

The company’s management was then afraid of lawsuits and decided to hush up the case without involving the police.

This corporate mistake ultimately cost the lives of several innocent people.

Experts in behavioral analysis at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, having studied these materials, drew up a clear psychological portrait of the maniac.

Williams was not an ordinary killer who acted for money or primitive pleasure.

He suffered from a severe progressive form of the god complex and considered himself a brilliant architect of other people’s pain.

A true ruler of human destinies.

His main goal was to prove to the world and himself that he could break absolutely anyone.

The capture of Robert Dixon became a challenge for him the apogee of his criminal career.

breaking the strong analytical mind of a police detective hardened by years of hard service, making him sincerely believe in his own death and interrogate his own corpse.

This was to be his greatest experiment, his sick masterpiece of psychological destruction.

There was only one critical question left.

Where exactly was the perpetrator’s main base, his central underground laboratory equipped with video surveillance systems? The answer came from the depths of the dusty municipal archives of the district.

On November 27th, at 15 hours and 30 minutes, a young analyst who had been checking the Williams family’s property records for a week found an old yellow document.

According to these papers, back in the 70s of the last century, Todd’s grandfather owned the rights to develop a large copper mine near the town of Cameron.

In those years, the mine was recognized as unprofitable and officially mothballled with the entrances blocked with heavy beams.

However, no one canled the rights to the land and all the endless underground utilities.

12 years ago, Todd inherited the property, becoming the sole owner of a giant hidden from view dead maze.

Realizing the magnitude of the threat, at 18:00 that evening, an armed SWAT team silently surrounded William’s private home on the quiet outskirts of Paige.

The soldiers smashed down the sturdy front door with a heavy battering ram, expecting stiff armed resistance.

But the house greeted them with only deafening, dead silence.

All the rooms were perfectly cleaned.

The closet shelves were empty, and the hard drives from the computer had been removed in advance.

Todd seemed to have vanished into thin air.

However, in the center of the semi-d dark living room, on a perfectly clean glass table, a radio scanner stood alone, switched on.

It was tuned to a private police frequency and hissed softly, intercepting the conversations of the operatives on the street.

And next to it was a neatly clipped article from the morning local newspaper about the sudden disappearance of a 22year-old girl the day before.

On the white edges of the newsprint, the forensic team immediately noticed fresh stains of a specific red clay found only at great depths in the area of old copper mines.

And right in the middle of the article was Robert Dixon’s spare police badge, as if it were a direct invitation to go down to hell.

On December 1st, 2015, at 4:00 in the morning, the atmosphere at the Cookino County Sheriff’s Department was extremely tense.

A combined tactical team comprised of elite Federal Bureau of Investigation SWAT team members and the best local police officers was preparing for the most difficult assault in the state’s history.

Their target was an old copper mine abandoned in the 70s near the town of Cameron.

Each participant in the operation was well aware that they were heading into the territory of a dangerous enemy where absolutely every wrong step could be their last.

Despite the categorical protests of the chief medical officer of the Flagstaff Medical Center and the strong objections of his own superiors, Detective Robert Dixon managed to get himself included in the assault team as the chief consultant.

According to the minutes of the meetings, Robert convinced the command that he was the only one who perfectly understood the twisted logic of the dungeon architect.

The stakes were high.

Everyone knew that Todd Williams had taken a new victim.

The 22-year-old woman who had disappeared without a trace in the town of Paige a few days ago was now somewhere deep underground in the hands of a ruthless sadist whose time was running out.

At 6:00 in the morning, the heavy armored vans of the tactical group quietly approached the designated coordinates.

The desert greeted them with piercing December cold and dead, oppressive silence.

The landscape resembled a Martian desert, red rocks cut by deep shadows.

The cold wind howled eerily in the cracks of the sandstone, as if warning the uninvited guests of mortal danger.

The mine was located in a deep gorge hidden from prying eyes by massive stone mounds.

The main entrance, which according to official documents should have been securely bricked up with concrete 40 years ago, was skillfully disguised as a natural rockfall.

Behind the massive boulders was a heavy steel door equipped with a modern electronic lock.

This was only the first line of defense of the maniac.

When the sappers of the tactical group silently broke the mechanism and the heavy door opened with a terrible creek, icy cold and a pungent smell of rust came from the depths of the earth.

According to the special forces commander report, the dungeon turned out to be not just an old mine, but a real deadly labyrinth that Todd Williams had been methodically refurbishing for years.

The echoes of the assault team’s footsteps were lost in the endless shafts that ran off in different directions like the tentacles of a giant underground monster.

The specific smell of damp earth, old metal, and unknown chemicals created the atmosphere of a real crypt.

Moving deeper to a depth of 50 and then 100 ft, the operatives discovered a whole network of modified tunnels.

The maniac had turned the old infrastructure into his own personal impregnable fortress.

The walls were densely entangled with hundreds of feet of optical cable.

At every junction, in the pitch black, the red lights of infrared surveillance cameras flashed ominously.

Williams could see their every move.

Moreover, he had cunningly placed sound traps along the route, hidden speakers that would suddenly broadcast a low-frequency hum or the eerie echo of human screams.

These sounds repeatedly bounced off the walls, creating absolute disorientation in space and forcing the soldiers to nervously aim into the void.

For Robert Dixon, this slow descent turned into a real psychological torture.

a battle not only with the physical threat, but also with his own shattered mind.

In this suffocating darkness, illuminated only by the narrow beams of tactical flashlights, every sharp sound hurt the detectives exposed nerves.

As the assault team passed by a partially flooded section of the Adit, the rhythmic sound of water falling drop by drop from the ceiling to the stone floor instantly brought him back to that hellish canyon.

Robert’s breath hitched.

His heart began to beat frantically against his ribs, and the vision of his own rotting double came back to him.

Animal horror rolled in cold waves, trying to completely paralyze his will.

He clearly recalled the empty sockets of the dead man’s eyes.

He remembered the mechanical voice that had driven him mad.

This time, however, instead of despair, he felt cold, concentrated rage.

Dixon gritted his teeth to a loud chatter.

He gripped the handle of his service pistol so tightly that his knuckles turned white.

He kept telling himself that this time he was not a defenseless drugged victim in a delirium.

He was a homicide detective who had come into this darkness for justice.

And there was no way he was going to let a maniac break him a second time.

As the group moved down to the critical 200 ft below desert level, they came across a series of heavy airtight bulkheads.

Each one had to be carefully checked for hidden explosives.

The air temperature continued to drop rapidly, and the oxygen level was decreasing, forcing the men to breathe heavily and horarssely through their tactical masks.

Suddenly, up ahead, in the longest and darkest tunnel leading directly to the heart of the old mine, all the speakers simultaneously hissed.

The sound traps went off and out of the absolute darkness came the calm, measured, and painfully familiar voice of Todd Williams.

The maniac was addressing them through the intercom system.

According to the transcripts of the audio recordings from the operatives body cameras, the criminals voice sounded as clear as if he were standing right behind them.

He called Dixon by name, mockingly congratulating him on his return home to the dark world of the dead.

And then something came from the speakers that made the entire assault team instantly freeze in place.

It was not a recording or another sound illusion at all.

It was the muffled, desperate cry of a young woman coming from behind a massive steel door at the very end of the corridor.

But right in front of that door, an incredibly complex structure of dozens of taught wires connected to massive charges of industrial explosives was blocking the way, and an electronic timer had just started its irreversible silent countdown.

Gemini’s response.

On December 1st, 2015, at 7:005 in the morning, the assault team found themselves in the heart of an underground nightmare.

Having crossed a mind corridor, the operatives burst into the central hall of the old copper mine.

What they saw resembled the lair of a mad scientist.

In the center of a vast cave vault 200 feet below ground, Todd Williams had set up his main command post.

Along the stone walls stretched shelves densely packed with flickering monitors, powerful sound amplifiers, and recording equipment.

Screens continuously broadcast images from infrared cameras installed in absolutely every corner of this gigantic, frightening maze.

On a massive table was a studio microphone through which the maniac spent hours broadcasting destructive psychological attitudes directly into the tormented minds of his helpless victims.

But the dungeon architect himself was no longer in the control room.

Hearing the deafening screech of an armored door being opened, Williams retreated into an adjacent narrower attit.

According to the official reports of the police SWAT team, the criminal tried to block the last steel airtight door leading to the deadend tunnel behind him.

The operatives piled on the heavy barrier with all their weight, preventing the electronic locks from snapping.

An incredibly fierce hand-to-hand fight ensued in the cramped space, which was instantly filled with thick clouds of acurid red dust.

The use of any firearms was strictly prohibited due to the critically high risk of accidental detonation of accumulated gases and industrial explosives planted everywhere.

The pitch black of the old addit was chaotically broken only by the sharp beams of tactical flashlights securely attached to the helmets of the commandos.

Todd fought with the desperate, truly anim animalistic fury of a cornered large predator.

He navigated perfectly in the pitch black and delivered crushing blows using a heavy steel wrench.

Several experienced officers were quite seriously injured before they managed to throw the strong maniac onto the wet rock.

But it was at this crucial moment when the operatives heavy tactical boots pinned him securely to the cold ground that Williams bent sharply and reached for the radio detonator attached to his vest belt.

A single press of the button would have instantly brought down thousands of tons of rock, burying the police, the innocent hostage, and the creator of this hell forever in a gruesome mass grave.

It was at this elusive moment that Robert Dixon intervened.

According to the detailed testimony of the squad leader, the detective, who had been disciplined in the second echelon of the group, rushed forward.

He grabbed the maniac’s wrist with a steel grip just one inch from the button.

Williams, breathing heavily, spitting thick blood from his broken face, looked up at Robert frantically, laughing an eerie, gurgling laugh.

The maniac made one last attempt to use old psychological triggers.

Witnesses to the arrest heard Todd, looking directly into the detective’s eyes, call him a ghost.

a dead man who had escaped from the grave and now had to return to the red sands of the canyon.

He sincerely expected that the policeman’s broken psyche would give a fatal breakdown.

But Robert did not make a sound with absolutely icy calmness.

The detective rigidly pinned the criminal’s arm behind his back and with a dry click fastened the handcuffs on his wrists.

It was the final victory over the animal horror.

In the tightly isolated cell only 40 square ft in size, the police finally found the missing 22year-old woman.

She was alive, although in a state of deep nervous shock.

The hostage was immediately brought to the surface and carefully handed over to the paramedics on duty.

The story of the dungeon architect ended in a high-profile trial.

Todd Williams was found guilty of absolutely all charges and is currently awaiting a lethal injection in a maximum security cell.

As for Robert Dixon, exactly 3 months after the assault, he officially submitted his resignation for health reasons.

The medical commission ruled that the effects of severe hallucinogen poisoning no longer allowed him to continue his service in the homicide department.

At the end of this grim story, the former detective often arrives alone at the edge of the colossal concrete Glen Canyon Dam.

He stands there for a long time, leaning heavily on the parapit, and silently stares at the endless red wasteland bathed in the Arizona sun.

The desert wind rustles his jacket, bringing the dry smell of stone heated for centuries.

Robert Dixon is a miraculous survivor.

He was able to keep his sanity, save his life, and put the ruthless monster behind bars.

But deep inside he realizes a terrible inescapable truth.

Some part of his soul has never been able to get to the surface.

It has remained there forever at the very bottom of a narrow dark crevice continuing its endless mad interrogation in the red dust.