The interviewer pulled Casey aside and showed her the preliminary report on her tablet.
The grooming pattern started 6 months ago with small boundary violations that got worse each week. Lauren had told Tommy it was their special secret and that bad things would happen if he told. The report documented bruising and multiple stages of healing and behavioral changes his teachers had noticed.
Casey said this report alone would strengthen the criminal case significantly. That afternoon, the detective called me into his office and warned me about talking to Conrad’s family. He said any coordination between witnesses could look like tampering, even if we were just checking on each other. Casey told me all communication had to go through her office from now on to avoid any appearance of interference.
She gave me a special email account to use only for case related messages that she could monitor. 2 days later, Casey got a judge to sign an order for complete forensic imaging of Lauren’s phone. The tech team would recover deleted files and hidden apps to find the real source of those fake messages. Lauren’s lawyer fought it for a week, saying it violated her privacy, but the judge sided with us.
The phone company finally sent over the complete records, showing every call and text from my phone for the past year. Casey spread them out on her conference table and highlighted the relevant dates with a yellow marker. There were zero messages to Lauren’s number during any of the time she claimed I’d threatened her. Casey called it our first solid piece of evidence that she was lying about the threats.
She filed it with the court that same afternoon while I sat in her office eating stale crackers from the vending machine. Cory called Casey’s office the next morning with big news about Lauren’s phone. He’d found a spoofing app hidden in a calculator folder that was installed at 11:47 p.m. the night of the wedding. That matched exactly when Lauren locked herself in the bathroom after we called the police.
The app could fake messages from any phone number and make them look real in screenshots. Cory sent over the technical report showing the installation timestamp and app history. Casey immediately forwarded everything to the prosecutor who called back within an hour. He said he was becoming less interested in pursuing any charges against me given the mounting evidence, but he wouldn’t formally close the investigation yet because that’s how prosecutors protect themselves from lawsuits. Casey said this was typical
hedging and not to worry about it, but I couldn’t sleep anyway. 3 days later, my phone started blowing up with notifications from numbers I didn’t recognize. Someone had leaked details about the case online and posted my name and photo on social media. The messages started nice enough with people saying they supported me, but quickly turned dark.
Death threats filled my voicemail within hours. People found my work email and sent graphic descriptions of what they wanted to do to me. Someone posted my friend’s address where we were staying and said they were coming to burn it down. Casey helped me screenshot everything and file police reports while we installed security cameras at my friend’s house.
The harassment got so bad, I had to change my phone number twice in one week. My friend’s kids were scared to go to the school because cars kept driving slowly past the house taking pictures. Casey hired a private security company to patrol the neighborhood and escort us to court appearances. The online mob had decided I was guilty without knowing any facts about the case.
