30. The Donovan Hotel Murder & Tragic Double Life of David Messerschmitt

Washington D.C. is a city built on carefully managed reputations and dangerous secrets. 

On February 10, 2015, the pristine public life of high-profile intellectual property lawyer David Messerschmitt collided with a dark, hidden reality. 

Found brutally stabbed in Room 400 of the upscale Donovan Hotel, David’s death sent shockwaves through Capitol Hill.

​In this episod  of Homocidal Tendency, we unravel one of the most chilling D.C. true crime cases of the decade. 

We break down the digital footprint that blew the case wide open from burner Gmail accounts and Grindr profiles to the fatal Craigslist "Casual Encounters" ad that set a deadly trap. 

We also explore the devastating irony of the perpetrators, Jamyra Gallmon and Dominique Johnson, and the massive digital mistake with a Washington D.C. Metro card that finally brought them down.

​A locked door keeps the world out, but it can’t protect you from what you invite inside.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Washington DC is a city built on secrets. Behind the Marble Columns and the Taylor's dudes, everyone has something to hide. But some secrets. Some secrets are fatal. February 10th, 2015. The Donovan Hotel in Thomas Circle. It's a sleek, trendy spot, the kind of place where the city's power players go to unwind. But on the fourth floor, behind the heavy door of room 400, the silence is deafening. When housekeeping step inside, they weren't greeted by an unmade bed or empty room service trays. They were greeted with a nightmare. 30-year-old David Messerschmitt, a brilliant, successful married Capitol Hill lawyer, was dead. He had been brutally stabbed, leaving behind a pristine public reputation and a hidden digital trail that was about to blow his entire world wide open. A burner email, a Craigslist trap, and a stranger waiting in the shadows with zip ties and a blade. Sometimes the life you build in the light is no match for the things you chase in the dark. And we're on episode 30. That's wild. But before we crack open tonight's episode, let's get through a little bit of housekeeping. First off, a massive thank you to everyone who's been leaving five-star ratings and reviews. It generally helps the show creep its way up in the charts and find new listeners. If you haven't yet, take a quick second to drop a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the absolute best way to support the podcast. Also, make sure you're following the show on social media. You can find us on most socials at HomicidalTenancy. I'll be dropping the episode graphics for the case, and they're gonna lean into those heavy, dark, grungy analog textures. It's the best place to find all the visual companions to the episode. Alright, grab your headphones, make sure your door's locked, and let's settle in. We're heading into the nation's capital, Washington, DC. It's known for its polished exteriors, powerful people, and carefully managed reputations. But, as we're about to see, the most dangerous secrets aren't the ones locked away in any government files. They're the ones hiding in plain sight on our phone. Let's get into the tragic double life of David Messerschmidt and the deadly trap waiting in room 400. To really understand the shock of what happened in room 400, you have to understand who David Messerschmidt was. By all accounts, he was the definition of an overachiever, the kind of guy who seemed to do exactly everything right. David was born on April 24th, 1984 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was the third child and the third son of Marvin and Gail Matterschmidt. Growing up in the Anderson Township area, he was the kid other parents probably pointed to as a role model. At Anderson High School, David just didn't get good grades. He graduated with honors. He was in the marching band, and he worked his way up to drum major. He was driven, focused, and naturally brilliant, but people who knew him said he wasn't arrogant about it. He was just generally a nice guy. After high school, David spent a year at the University of Toledo before transferring to Ohio State, where he majored in history and joined the rowing team. He even spent a summer studying at Oxford University in pre-law. Law was clearly his calling. After graduating from Ohio State with honors in 2006, he landed a highly coveted internship working under U.S. District Judge Susan Blott back in Cincinnati. From there, it was on to the prestigious Boston University School of Law, and again, he completely crushed it, graduating with honors in 2009. But David wasn't just a machine built for studying. He had a real zest for life. He loved running, cooking, and traveling the world. Word is, he had an absolute weak spot for fresh baked brownies and greater's ice cream, which if you're from Cincinnati, you know is a local institution. By the time he moved to Washington, D.C. around 2010 to step into the high-stake world of corporate and intellectual property law, he had the world on its string. He was working for major international firms like Mayor Brown and eventually DLA Piper. Colleagues remembered him as a brilliant lawyer who was fantastic to work with. And right in the middle of a massive upward trajectory in the summer of 2012, David returned to Cincinnati to marry his wife, Kim. From the outside looking in, the picture was flawless. The rising legal star, the happy marriage, the bright, limitless future. To the outside world, David and his wife Kim were the quintessential young power couple. Their story started back in college at Ohio State University. They shared a fierce competitive streak and a love for athletics, both rowing for the school's team. It was the kind of shared passion that builds an incredible strong bond. They spent countless hours practicing on the water and traveling the country together for competitions. In the summer of 2012, they returned to Cincinnati to get married. By the time they settled into their life in Washington, DC, they seemed to have it all figured out. David was crushing his career, and Kim was right there along beside him, building a life. But marriage, as we know, can sometimes be a house with a locked door. On the evening of February 9th, 2015, Kim was expecting David home shortly. He had sent her a final text message, and she thought he would be walking through the door at any minute. But minutes turned into hours. She waited for slightly more than five agonizing hours before making the call that no spouse ever wants to make. She dot the police and reported her husband missing. Less than twenty four hours later, her entire reality was shattered when David's body was found with stab wounds in a bedroom on the fourth floor of the Donovan Hotel. But the tragedy of losing her husband was only the first blow. The second was a revelation that Kim never saw coming. Desperate to help detectives find her husband's killer, Kim did exactly what you'd expect a cooperative spouse to do. Just days after the murder, she handed over a tablet computer containing David's Gmail account. She hoped the police would find a clue, a disgruntled client, a war conflict, I mean anything. Instead, investigators unlocked a completely alternative reality. They discovered that David was leading a double life that even his wife was completely unaware of. He was using an alias and posting ads on Craigslist to connect with other men. The illusion of their perfect marriage was fractured in an instant, and it was with in that hidden, high-risk digital world that David crossed paths with the people that would end his life. In this day and age, when a person vanishes, the first thing investigators look at is their phone, their computer, their digital footprint. Our devices hold the map to our lives. But in David's case, his devices just didn't provide a map, they ripped a lid off of a secret world. A few days after the murder, still desperate for any leads, like we said, Kim handed over a tablet to the DC police. Detectives started digging into his web history, emails, looking for anything out of place. What they found completely changed the trajectory of the investigation. David Messersmid had constructed a meticulous hidden digital double life. Detectives uncovered an alternate email address that he had set up, DCGuy456 at Gmail, and connected to that email was a Google Voice number. And using that email and number, David was operating under an alias of Matt Smith. Now, when this information came out, the media and the public immediately started asking questions about David's sexuality. Was he gay? Was he bisexual? And was he just exploring? The truth is, because how this story ends, David never got a chance to define his own identity or tell his own story. And what the police records and digital footprints did confirm was his behavior. For an undetermined amount of time, David had been actively seeking out sexual encounters with other men. Investigators discovered that Matt Smith had a profile on Grinder. The all-male social networking app, it's used for dating and hookups if you don't know what Grinder is, but Grinder wasn't his only outlet. He was also heavily utilizing the casual encounter section of Craigslist. This wasn't just a fleeting thought or one-time thing. After the murder, individuals from the DC gay community actually came forward to the police and to the press, stating that they had previously communicated with Matt Smith through that DC guy four hundred five six email address. He had been quietly navigating this hidden world right under the nose of his wife, his family, and his procedures law firm. It's a tragic reality. In 2015, the successful married corporate lawyer still felt he had to hide part of himself. He had to use burner emails, fake names, and a clandestine hotel room. And it was the very need for secrecy, the anonymity of Craigslist and burner accounts that created a blind spot of vulnerability. When you're operating in the shadows, you don't always know who you're actually talking to. And on the afternoon of February 9th, David sent on a message into the dark, and something terrible answered back. Before we get to the Craigslist post that set this whole tragedy into motion, we need to talk about where it actually happened. The setting of a crime tells you a lot about the people involved, and the Donovan Hotel was a very specific kind of place. Located at 1155 14th Street Northwest, right on Thomas Circle, it's set at the nexus of a rapidly gentrifying vibrant stretch of the city. This wasn't some seedy rundown motel on the edge of town where people go to disappear. This was a high-end, ultramodern boutique hotel. The Donovan had a reputation for being an enclave for the hipster business traveler. It was sleek, futuristic, and dripping my style. Power players and tourists alike would spend their afternoons grabbing drinks at the DNV rooftop lounge by the pool. Inside, the aesthetic was dark and atmospheric. We're talking dim, mirrored hallways, heavy dark oak doors, and a color palette of deep purples and rust. The rooms were designed with this edgy, almost Berlin inspired minimalism, leather-wrapped headboards that extended into canopy beds, suspended bubble chairs in the lobby, and these very quirky, nautilus-shaped spiral walk-in showers. It was luxurious, it was highly visible, and it was entirely respectable. When David Messersmith checked into room 400 on February 9th, he wasn't fleeing his life. He was booking a space in the heart of the city, just a few miles from the Capitol Hill home he shared with his wife. The Donovan offered the perfect illusion of safety. The heavy doors and the upskilled anonymity made it feel like it was a fortress, a place where a high profile lawyer could step out of his public life, lock the door, and be someone else for a few hours. But as we all know, a locked door doesn't just keep the world out. Sometimes it locks you in with whoever you invite inside. David is operating on a tight schedule. He's a lawyer. His life is divided into billable hours, meetings, and strict timelines. He has a wife waiting for him back in his Capitol Hill home, and he's already sent a text letting her know that he'll be home later that evening. But first, he carves out a narrow window for his other life. David logs onto Crane's list. Back in 2015, before the site shut down its personal ads, the casual encounters section was the wild west of the internet. It was a place where people could post completely anonymous solicitations, often arranging meetups within hours or even minutes. Operating under the email address DCGuy456 at Gmail, David posts an ad in the men seeking men section. He gets straight to the point. He says he's looking for a guy to come meet him at a downtown hotel for a quick hookup. And he sets a very specific time frame. He tells any potential respondents that he'll be waiting in his room between 7 and 7.30. After that window closes, David Messerschmid goes back to being a devoted husband. But it doesn't take long for the bait to get a bite. An email drops into his inbox from a Yahoo account, Chris Sanchez 0906 at yahoo.com. Chris Sanchez is interested. The two of them start messaging back and forth, ironing out the details. Chris agrees to the time frame. David gives him the address of the Donovan hotel. He tells him to come up to the fourth floor. Room 400. Think about what's going through David's mind in those moments. He is in this ultra modern high-end hotel. The door's locked, and he successfully managed the two halves of his life again. He's looking at the clock, waiting for 7 p.m. to roll around. He thinks he knows who exactly is going to be on the other side of the door. A guy named Chris, looking for the exact same anonymous strings-free encounter that he is. But there's the terrifying reality of the internet. You can read a name on the screen. You can read the words they type. But until that door actually opens, you have absolutely no idea who's gonna be standing on the other side. As the clock inches towards 730, footsteps finally move down the plush carpeted hallway of the fourth floor. They stop outside room 400. A knock at the door. David walks over and turns the handle. But the person standing in the hallway isn't Chris Sanchez. When David Meshismid opened the heavy door, he was not greeted by Chris Sanchez. There was no Chris Sanchez. Standing in the dimly lit hallway was a 21-year-old woman named Jamara Galman. And she hadn't come to the Donovan Hotel for a hookup. She had come for a shakedown. To understand how Gowman ended up at Davis Dorf, we have to look at the anatomy of the trap. Jamar Galman and her 19-year-old girlfriend, Dominique Johnson, shared an apartment in southeast DC. They were not hardened career criminals. In fact, Galman had no prior criminal record. But in February 2015, they were broke. And they needed cash fast. They didn't want to rob a liquor store or mug someone on the street. They wanted a target who wouldn't fight back, and more importantly, a target who wouldn't dare to call the police at all. They realized that the casual encounters section of Craigslist was essentially a hunting ground filled with vulnerable prey. If they targeted a man seeking a secret, anonymous same-sec hookup, especially if he was married or in the closet, they figured he would be way too terrified to even report it to the police. After securing the time slot with David under the Chris Sanchez alias, the two women made a pit stop. They walked into a CVS pharmacy. They walked down the hardway aisle and they purchased a pack of plastic zip ties. The plan was cold and straightforward. Gauman would walk into the hotel room, she would overpower David, use the zip ties to bind his hands, strip him of his cash, his phone, credit cards, and walk right up. He'd be left tied up, humiliated, and entirely unwilling to explain to the police and his wife why he was bound in a hotel room, he rented for Craigslist hookup. At 7 44 p.m., just minutes after David's window of time was supposed to close, security cameras in the Donovan Hotel lobby captured Galman walking through the doors. She was wearing a dark hooded jacket pulled up tight to obscure her face from the cameras. She kept her head down. She looked like anyone else trying to avoid the winter chill. Johnson stayed behind, waiting outside the hotel for her girlfriend to finish the job. Galman rode the elevator up to the fourth floor. She walked down the hallway. She knocked on the door to room 400. When you plan a robbery based on a psychological profile, you're betting everything on human behavior. Galman bet that a closeted man in a hotel room would freeze, submit, and hand over his wallet to protect his secret. But David Messersmid was a 30-year-old former athlete. He was a rower, and he was in good shape. And when a stranger stepped into his hotel room and pulled a folding knife, the instinct to protect his secret was instantly overridden by the primal instinct to survive. According to Galman's own confession later on, she stepped into the room and made her intentions clear. She produced the zip ties, and she wanted him to be bound. She wanted his valuables. But David refused to comply. He lunged at her. What happened next wasn't clean. It wasn't a silent robbery. It was a chaotic, desperate struggle for life in a confined space. They fought. David grabbed Gaulman's arms, trying to stop her, trying to rustle the weapon away. But in the close quarters of the room, the knife gave Galman a lethal advantage. As they grappled, she began plunging the blade into him. She stabbed David seven times. The autopsy would later detail that the sheer brutality of the attack. He suffered defensive wounds to his arms as he desperately tried to block the blade, but the fatal blows were devastating. She stabbed him in the back, the groin, and directly into his chest, piercing his heart. David collapsed onto the floor, bleeding out onto the blush carpet of room four hundred. Galman had just committed a brutal murder, and in the frantic, adrenaline fueled aftermath, she still carried out the robbery. But she didn't walk out with a massive payday or a briefcase full of cash. She scavenged his pockets. She grabbed David's cell phone, and she grabbed his Washington, DC Smart Trip Metro card. That was it. A man's life, a brilliant career, and a family's future extinguished over a used transit card, a cell phone, and also reported $40 in cash. And with that, Galma didn't linger. She slipped out of room 400, leaving David dying on the floor. She made her way down the stairwell, avoiding the elevators, and slipped out of the Donovan Hotel into the freezing February night. She met back up with Dominique Johnson, who had been waiting outside the entire time, blood on her hands, holding a stolen cell phone, transit card, and wad of cash. Galman and her girlfriend walked to a nearby bus stop. They board the bus, rode it back to their apartments, and went on with their lives. But back at the Donovan, it would be hours before housekeeping. Would turn the lock and realized that polished, high-end illusion of the hotel had been completely shadowed. Tuesday morning, February 10th, 2015. The sun comes up over Washington, and the city goes back to work. Lobbyists hit the hill, interns grab coffee, and the metro fills up with commuters. It's a completely ordinary, freezing winter morning. But for Kim, David's wife, the nightmare has already begun. She hasn't slept. David told her he would be home the previous evening. By 2 a.m., the panic had fully set in. Well, she had paced the floors, calling his phone over and over again, only to get voicemail, and finally, she made the call to the police department to report him missing. At that point, the police treated it like a standard missing adult case. There was no immediate evidence of foul play, and maybe he had a breakdown. Maybe there was an accident. They started running his name, trying to find a hospital admission or a traffic report. But they didn't know they needed to be looking at the Donovan Hotel. A few miles away from David's home, the Donovan Hotel was waking up. Guests were packing their bags, grabbing their breakfast at the restaurant downstairs, and heading out to catch flights or making morning meetings. Standard checkout had came and went. By 1115 AM, the housekeeping staff was making their rounds on the fourth floor. They got to room 400. They knocked, no answer. They knocked again, nothing. Assuming the guests had either overstayed or just left without formally checking out at the desk, a housekeeper swiped their master card, the lock chimed, and the door swung inward. The sleek, ultramodern luxury of the room was completely desecrated. There was blood on the floor, and lying on the plush carpet was the body of David Master Smith. The housekeeper backed out, terrified, and the hotel immediately went into lockdown. Within minutes, the DC police descended on the Thomas Circle Hotel. The siren's wailed, squad cars blocked off the street, and crime scene tape was strung across the sleek, middlemen's lobby of the Donovan. When homicide detectives stepped into room four hundred, they could immediately read the violence of the scene. This wasn't a clean, targeted hit. It was frantic, a brutal struggle. The room showed clear signs of a fight, and David's body bore the horrific evidence of it. Seven stab wounds, defensive cuts on his arms. But as crime scene investigators started bagging evidence and dusting for fingerprints, they quickly realized something else. He wasn't registered under his own name. He had booked the room under an alias. It took time for detectives to connect the body in room four hundred to the missing persons report filed by Kim just nine hours earlier. When they finally made the connection, the detectives had to make the drive to Capitol Hill. They had to knock on Kim's door and deliver news that her husband wasn't just missing, he had been slaughtered in a hotel room across town. As the shockwaves of Davis' death hit his family, his law firm, and the local news, the investigators were left standing in the room with a ghost. They had a body, they had a bloody hotel room, but they had absolutely no idea who had walked through the door the night before. The trail was already cold, but the killers had taken a souvenir, and that souvenir was about to come a digital taking time off. In the days immediately following the murder, the investigation into David's death and hit a wall. The crime scene in room 400 was chaotic, but it didn't hand the detectives an easy answer. So the police department did what they always do when they have a ghost on their hands, and they looked at the videotape. Detectives pulled the security footage from the Donovan Hotel, and they found her. At 7 44 PM on the night of the murder, the cameras caught a figure walking through the sleek lobby, heading towards the elevators, but the footage was frustratingly ambiguous. The person was heavily bundled up against the February cold, wearing a dark hooded jacket pulled tight around their face. They kept their head down, avoiding the camera's gaze. The police released the footage to the public, hoping someone would recognize the walk, the jacket, anything. But the tips that came in led nowhere. The figure in the video remained a shadow. While the public was staring at a blurry figure on the evening news, the real breakthrough was happening quietly in the digital realm. Remember the tablet that Kim handed over to the police? That was the skeleton key. Once investigators unlocked David's alternative life as Matt Smith and found the DC Guy 456 email, they had a direct line to the killer. They found the Craigslist ad, and more importantly, they found the response from Chris Sanchez 0906. Detectives immediately fired off subpoenas to Yahoo, demanding the account information, the IP addresses, and the digital footprint tied to Chris Sanchez. But tech companies take time to process those requests, and IP addresses can be masked or routed through public Wi-Fi. The digital hunt was progressing, but it's slow. But Jamar Galman and Dominique Johnson made a fatal mistake. A mistake so incredibly reckless it almost defies belief. When Galman fled room 400, she took David's cell phone, which likely got powered down and ditched, but she took his Washington, D.C. smart trip metro card. Now, if you've ever lived in a major city, you know how these work. It's a plastic transit card you load with money and tap at the turnstiles. What most people don't think about is that every single time you tap that card, the system logs it. Once detectives realized that the stolen smart trip card was active, all they had to do was wait for a ping. They tracked the card's usage across the city. It was being used heavily in southeast DC. And investigators took those digital timestamps from the transit logs and went straight to the Metro Transit Police. They pulled the high definition surveillance footage from the specific subway stations and the specific busways at the exact moment Steve Garr was being used. And there she was. No hood pultoid, no shadow covering her face, just a clear, undeniable image of Dominique Johnson living her life, riding the train, paying the fare with the bloodstained plastic of a murdered man. Once the DC police pulled Dominique Johnson's face from the Metro Security Station cameras, the dominoes started to fall fast. The digital footprint the Metro card swipes left, the IP addresses from the Yahoo emails, and the cell phone tower pings had finally emerged with the physical world. Detectives didn't just have a granny image of a figure in a hooded jacket anymore. They had a name. And once they had Dominique Johnson's name, it took almost no time to figure out who she lived with in DC. Her twenty one-year-old girlfriend, Jemira Galman. When investigators pulled Galman's ID photo, they looked back at the surveillance footage from the Donovan Hotel lobby. The height, the build, the profile under the dark hood, it was a match. The net was officially closed. On April 1st, 2015, almost two months after David Meshersmith bled to death on the floor of room 400, the police department had moved in. They arrested Jemima Gauman and brought her into the interrogation room. Now, a lot of killers, especially those who plan on a trap, will sit in that room and lie until their teeth fall out. They'll deny that they were ever there. They'll ask for a lawyer. But Gauman wasn't a hardened criminal. She didn't have a record. The weight of what she had done combined with the absolute mountain of digital and physical evidence the detectives slapped down on the table, it broke her. She waved from Red Arights and confessed to everything. Gauman would walk the detectives through the entire chilling plot. She admitted that she was the one behind the Chris Sanchez Yahoo email account. She admitted that she and Dominique had specifically targeted the men seeking men's section of Greg's list because they believed the victims would be too scared of being outed to call the cops. Gauman claimed the murder was never the plan. He insisted that she only brought the folding knife to intimidate David to force him to comply so she could zip tie his hands and empty his pockets. But she told the detectives that David fought back. When he grabbed her arms and tried to disarm her, she panicked. She said she closed her eyes and just started stabbing. She admitted to stealing his cell phone and the Metro card. She admitted to fleeing down the stairs and meeting Dominique outside. A week later, on April 8th, the police went back to Southeast DC and arrested 19-year-old Dominique Johnson. Johnson hadn't held the knife. She hadn't been inside the Donovan Hotel, but she had helped hatch the plot. She had waited outside as the getaway partner, and she had carelessly used the dead man's transit card for weeks after. Both women were now in custody. The mystery of the Donovan Hotel murder was solved. But as the case moved from the interrogation room to the courtroom, the sheer senselessness of the crime would leave the judge, the prosecutors, and David's family completely devastated. When the evidence is that absolute, when you have a murder weapon, the stolen property, the digital trail, the CCTV footage, and a full on tape confession, there's rarely a dramatic courtroom trial. In May 2015, just three months after the murder, both women accepted plea deals in DC. Jamaira Galman pleaded guilty to second degree murder while armed. Dominique Johnson pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit robbery. In August of that year, they stood before Judge Michael Ryan for sentencing. The courtroom was packed with David's family, his colleagues, and his wife Kim. When Kim took the stand to deliver her impact statement, she didn't focus on the double life or the betrayal. She focused on the man she loved, the future that was stolen from them, and the sheer senseless brutality of how it ended. She told the court how her husband was a good man who had been slaughtered over nothing. And the judge agreed. During the sentencing, Judge Ryan looked at Galman and called the crime chilling and callous. He noted the horrific irony that David Messermitt, a man who spent his life studying the law, working in the justice system, and building the pristine career, was killed by someone who valued his life less than a price of a cell phone and a MetroCard. Jamara Galman was sentenced to 24 years in federal prison. Dominique Johnson, who had waited outside and later used a stolen transit card, was sentenced to one year, with six months suspended on the condition of probation. She essentially served six months for helping set the trap that ended the man's life. David Mesher Smith's story is a tragedy on multiple levels. Yes, it's a cautionary tale about the internet. It's a terrifying reminder of how vulnerable we make ourselves when we seek out anonymity, and how easily predators can weaponize our own secrets against us. But it's also a tragedy about the closet. Even in 2015, a brilliant, successful man felt that he couldn't live his truth in the light. He felt forced to carve out his hidden, high-risk space in the dark, just to explore who he was. And because of that fury, he walked perfectly into a trap set by someone who knew exactly how to exploit it. And David deserved better. He deserved the chance to figure out his life, to have those hard conversations with his wife, and to move forward. Instead, his story ended on the floor of Room 400. Beyond the digital footprints and the brittle timeline of what happened in room 400, there's a distinctively darker, more tragic layer to this case. Jeremiah Galaman and Dominique Johnson weren't just random muggers. And they were a couple. They were two young women living together and navigating the world as part of the queer community. And that's where the gross, devastating irony of this case comes together. They didn't just target David randomly, they specifically hunted in the men's men's section of Craigslist because they understood the community. They knew the mechanics of the closet, they knew the deep-seated fear, the shame, and the absolute panic that comes with hiding your sexuality from your family and your colleagues. Instead of seeing the shared vulnerability as a point of empathy, they weaponized it. They looked at a man who was struggling to live his truth in the light, and they saw nothing but an easy mark. They bet his life on the assumption that a closeted queer man would never come to the police. It's a horrific betrayal. The queer community is supposed to be a safe harbor for people to figure out who they are. But in this case, the call was coming from inside the house. David was looking for a connection in the dark because he felt he couldn't have it in the light. And the people waiting for him in the shadows didn't offer him community. They offered him a blade. A locked door keeps the world out. But it can't protect you from who you invite inside. That's gonna do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening to Homicidal Tendency. If you're digging the podcast, take a second to hit subscribe and leave a five-star review. It's the absolute best way to help the show grow. Make sure you check out the social pages for the images from this episode. Remember, watch your back. And always check who's standing on the other side of the door. I'm Matt, and I'll see you next time.