Part 2: I Wasn’t His Only Victim
Dererick continued moving around the bedroom as though I were nothing more than an unconscious object. He opened his laptop beside the bed, transferred the photographs he had just taken, and appeared to upload them somewhere while repeatedly checking the notebook for instructions.
His phone kept buzzing, and every new message seemed to tell him what to do next. At one point, he took several additional photographs and immediately sent them back, confirming that someone else was actively watching and directing at least part of what was happening.
Then Dererick pulled a small swab from the black bag and collected samples from several areas of my skin. He sealed each one inside a separate plastic bag with the same calm, clinical precision he had used when cutting the fabric from my pajamas.
Eventually, he packed away the camera, notebook, and laptop. Before leaving the bedroom, he leaned down and kissed my forehead with the same tenderness he had shown me countless times throughout our marriage.
“Sweet dreams, Anna.”
Hearing his gentle voice after everything I had just witnessed made my stomach turn. A few minutes later, I heard the front door close quietly, followed by the sound of his car pulling away from the house shortly before three in the morning.
Only then did I allow myself to move.
My hands were shaking so badly that I could barely sit up. Dererick had not only been secretly sedating me; he had photographed me, repositioned my body, collected samples, documented everything, and communicated with other people while doing it.
He had told me earlier that he was leaving for a three-day business trip to Chicago, which meant I had a narrow window to discover what he was involved in. After waiting several more minutes to make sure he wasn’t coming back, I started searching for the personal laptop he kept separate from his work computer.
Eventually, I found a locked briefcase beneath our bed. I tried our anniversary as the combination, and when the lock clicked open, relief and dread hit me at the same time.
The laptop contained hundreds of photographs organized into folders by date. Some of them went back nearly eight months, long before I had begun noticing anything unusual.
Then I saw folders labeled with women’s names.
Jennifer. Patricia. Michelle.
There were at least six women.
I opened Jennifer’s folder and found photographs disturbingly similar to the ones Dererick had taken of me. As the dates progressed, however, she appeared increasingly weak and unwell, while Patricia’s and Michelle’s folders revealed the same frightening pattern.
Then I found a document titled “Client Communications.”
It showed that Dererick had been running an organized criminal operation in which paying customers requested photographs and specific staged scenarios involving women whose condition gradually deteriorated. Different requests carried different prices, and several messages showed customers giving detailed instructions about what they wanted him to document.
I kept searching until I found an email sent only two days earlier that mentioned me by name. One customer had asked about something called “Graduation Services,” and Dererick’s response made my hands start trembling again.
He had written that I was “almost ready.”
He would “begin the final phase soon.”
I had no idea exactly what that meant, but after seeing the later photographs of the other women, I knew waiting to find out could be dangerous. I copied every file I could onto a flash drive, then searched the bedroom until I discovered Dererick’s notebook hidden in his sock drawer.
The entries contained detailed records of substances, amounts, physical reactions, and customer requests. More recent notes mentioned people asking about “permanent access,” and Dererick had written that I was becoming suspicious and he might need to “accelerate the timeline.”
That was enough.
Whatever his final phase involved, I believed I was in immediate danger. I photographed every page of the notebook, returned the laptop and briefcase exactly where I had found them, and forced myself to think carefully about what came next.
Dererick could not know I had discovered his secret.
Not yet.
But in three days, he was supposed to come home.
And before that happened, I needed to make sure I would not be waiting there alone.
