A New Jersey family bought their dream house. But according to the creepy letters they started to get, they weren’t the only ones interested in it. Read reeveswiedeman's 2018 report, which is the basis of the new Netflix limited series TheWatcher
, a newsletter miniseries that resurfaces classic stories of ever-rising rents, the next hot neighborhood, and some truly nightmarish living situations from theOne night in June 2014, Derek Broaddus had just finished an evening of painting at his new home in Westfield, New Jersey, when he went outside to check the mail.
Do you need to fill the house with the young blood I requested? Better for me. Was your old house too small for the growing family? Or was it greed to bring me your children? Once I know their names I will call to them and draw them tooThe envelope had no return address. “Who am I?” the person wrote. “There are hundreds and hundreds of cars that drive by 657 Boulevard each day. Maybe I am in one. Look at all the windows you can see from 657 Boulevard. Maybe I am in one.
Andrea Woods replied the next morning: A few days before moving out, the Woodses had also received a letter from “The Watcher.” The note had been “odd,” she said, and made similar mention of The Watcher’s family observing the house over time, but Andrea said she and her husband had never received anything like it in their 23 years in the house and had thrown the letter away without much thought.
Will they sleep in the attic? Or will you all sleep on the second floor? Who has the bedrooms facing the street? I’ll know as soon as you move in. It will help me to know who is in which bedroom. Then I can plan better. One activity all locals recognized as treacherous is trying to buy a house. “There’s a lot of money and a lot of ego,” one resident, who requested anonymity before discussing Westfield real estate, told me. “I’ve seen bidding wars where friends lost by $300,000.” The Broadduses’ house was on the Boulevard, a wide, tree-lined street with some of the more desirable homes in town, as The Watcher had noted: “The Boulevard used to be THE street to live on … You made it if you lived on the Boulevard.
At one point, Derek was chatting with John Schmidt, who lived two doors down, when Schmidt told him about the Langfords, who lived between them. Peggy Langford was in her 90s, and several of her adult children, all in their 60s, lived with her. The family was a bit odd, Schmidt said, but harmless. He described one of the younger Langfords, Michael, who didn’t work and had a beard like Ernest Hemingway, as “kind of a Boo Radley character.
The Broadduses also turned to several experts. They employed a private investigator, who staked out the neighborhood and ran background checks on the Langfords but didn’t find anything noteworthy. Derek reached out to a former FBI agent who served as the inspiration for Clarice Starling in— they were on a high-school board of trustees together — and they also hired Robert Lenehan, another former FBI agent, to conduct a threat assessment.
But the focus remained on the Langfords. In cooperation with Westfield police, the Broadduses sent a letter to the Langfords announcing plans to tear down the house, hoping to prompt a response. Detective Lugo brought Michael Langford in for a second interview but got nowhere, and his sister, Abby, accused the police of harassing their family.
to 657 Boulevard, including a new alarm system, were finished within a few months. But the idea of moving in filled the Broadduses with overwhelming anxiety. Could they let their kids play outside or have friends over? Would they get a new letter every week? Derek priced out trained German shepherds and posted a job on a website for military veterans — “All you have to do is work out in the backyard every day” — but the Broadduses hadn’t bought 657 to feel bunkered in a fortress.
Derek and Maria thought about what they would have done had the previous owners told them about their letter from The Watcher. The Woodses, both retired scientists, told the Broadduses that they remembered the letter they received as more strange than threatening, thanking them for taking care of the house. They say they never had any issues. “We certainly never felt ‘watched,’ ” Andrea told them. They rarely even locked the doors.
Chambliss knew his colleagues had looked closely at Michael Langford. According to his brother Sandy Langford, Michael had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young man. He sometimes spooked newcomers to the neighborhood when he did strange things, like walk through their backyard or peek into the windows of homes that were being renovated. But those who knew him told me that the odd things he did were mostly just unusual neighborly kindnesses.
Chambliss and the Westfield police were also back at square one. The cops asked Andrea Woods for a DNA sample and interviewed her 21-year-old son, who was surprised to find that he suddenly seemed to be a suspect. A year after the fact, it was hard to find fresh leads, and the initial police canvas had been so porous that it had missed a significant clue: Around the same time that the Broadduses had received their first letter, another family on the Boulevard got a similar note from The Watcher.
The Broadduses hadn’t known how their neighbors would react to news about The Watcher, but they had lived in the area for a decade, and Maria’s family had been a part of the community for much longer, so it was shocking to find themselves accused of being con artists. To Derek, it seemed that some in Westfield preferred the conspiracy theory to considering whether their town might be home to a menace. “There’s a natural tendency to say, ‘I’ve lived here for 35 years; nothing’s happened to me.
Feeling as if they were out of options, the Broadduses’ real-estate lawyer proposed an idea: Sell the house to a developer, who could tear it down and split the property into two sellable homes. They thought they could get $1 million for the lot. Subdivisions like this had become common in Westfield, much to the chagrin of many locals, and 657 was one of the neighborhood’s largest lots.
After the lawyers, a parade of neighbors stood to speak. Glen Dumont, from across the street, said the proposal “would spell the end of the 600 block of Boulevard as we know it.” A woman whose kids had been to the Broadduses’ old home for a birthday party spoke on behalf of nine neighbors and presented 657 Boulevard as Westfield’s Alamo. “Our neighborhoods are constantly under attack from turf, lights, parking decks, you name it,” she said.
Maybe a car accident. Maybe a fire. Maybe something as simple as a mild illness that never seems to go away but makes you fell sick day after day after day after day after day. Maybe the mysterious death of a pet. Loved ones suddenly die. Planes and cars and bicycles crash. Bones break.
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