Killing Dad: The Crystal Howell Story - 5: The Runaway is Kidnapped

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

After a father-daughter bonding camping trip, an argument turns violent causing Crystal to turn to an Internet hook up for refuge; instead, she finds herself kidnapped. 

Verano, verano, reciclar es tan tu mano Es la lata de aceitunas que te tomas a la una, la crema que se termina cuando estás en la piscina El en base de ese polo que no se recicla solo y una lata de caballa que te coves en la playa A usar el aspatatací del refresco la lata un en base de paya y del agua My name is Jason Alexander, the star of bedtime stories of The Ingle Side In, a brand new scripted comedy podcast in which I play Palm Springs Hotelier Mel Haiber, who in the 1970s turned the rundown Ingle Side In into the best kept secret getaway for Hollywood's elite, Theaves and mobsters. The series also stars Brian Jordan Alvarez, Michael secret getaway for Hollywood's elite, thieves, and mobsters.

The series also stars Brian Jordan Alvarez, Michael McKean, Richard Kine, Lance Bass, and Moira. You can find bedtime stories of the Ingle Side-In on Sirius XM, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to follow the show so you never miss an episode. It was May 2011 and Crystal was living back in North Carolina with her dad, Michael, while helping him change light bulbs on a chandelier, Michael fell from the ladder, blamed Crystal, and she says he pushed her down the stairs. That night, she felt intense abdominal pain and was bleeding. At first, it didn't really register in my mind like what it is.

And then I realized, like, what, they might have been paining. I asked my dad, like, I'm in pain still, like, I need to go to the hospital, I think. And my dad said, well, that's what you did for getting all my control behind my back. And I'm just like, how did you even know about that? Like, what, how did you know about that? It kind of caught me off guard. So my dad didn't really, like,

unless you're dying, like, I'm not going to hospital, I'm not getting any medicine, none of that, like, my dad was very interested. So that's, it always says that pain is for the weak minded. So do you believe that was, in fact, a miscarriage? I'm not an author, and I guess I'll never really know. I believe me and Tyler had been having sex regularly. I was like, I need to reach out to him.

I maybe I should tell him what happened. He probably deserves to know, but on the other hand, I'm like, well, I don't want to involve him in my problems. It's best if I just let him go because he's already survived on his own family issues. I don't want to drag him into mine. So I'm together to need a breakup with him. And we need to go our separate ways because all this

is going to do is drag him down. And I don't want to do our simple different ways because all this is going to do is dragging down and I don't want to do that again. Crystal's boyfriend Tyler remembered the breakup going a little bit differently. I was the one who basically dictated the nonsense that I totally found out that I love a lot of lives. I was like, I can't do this with the D5. I told her she needed help. Whoever actually ended it, the tumultuous teenage love with Tyler was over. Now it was just Crystal and her dad, and the isolation Crystal would feel would be an understatement. I'm Melissa McCarty and I'm Kelly McLear. We are Emmy-nominated investigative journalists and we've been talking to Crystal Howell since her dad's murder in 2014.

Eight years after Michael Howell's murder, at 25 years old, Crystal is telling her story. We bring you the exclusive series, Killing Dad, a first-degree mistake. The days were taking by for Crystal and her dad, Michael, and in late 2011, the two set out on an adventure of sorts. So my dad was convinced that because of the arrest that he had gone through back in Georgia for something in the violation of the restraining order that he was always saying nobody's going to hire me.

I'm not going to do a good job. So basically he didn't even try. But we had enough money to get some of these from an inheritance and stuff to provide off of. We didn't live frivolously, but we made it. And so I'm like, I don't make extra money by bringing out a house. So we went out and we would just go camping. And my dad would always be like, this is great. Like, we're basically shooting tape and camp.

This is not as fun as people make it look. What it's knowing and cold is not as great as camping and having to go to school. And I had to brush my teeth with pre-gwater. Like, that's not a lifestyle. Like, there's no cold. So it was pretty annoying at times, but I don't know it's pretty up there. So that was on the right side and I'm just gonna eat my dad out here.

Melissa and I traveled to Augusta, Georgia to interview Crystal's great aunt Brenda. And she explained further the unorthodox living situation for dad and daughter. I think they probably kept it rented a big portion of the time, and he still rented it, which I thought was bad, but Crystal come to find out, really enjoyed a lot of those trips. They would go when somebody was written it, it could be Christmas time. They went and camped on the mountain. You know, and I thought, how are you gonna do that with your child?

But she loved it, I think. She liked it, because it was time with her dad. One day while camping, Crystal once again experienced the wrath of her dad. So my dad started to raise the alarm about my mom. We're gathering firewood. He's walking in front of me and we're going up the floor. And he's just talking about her and I'm just so tired.

I just feel like he's going to move on. It's been so long. I think like four years of that point. And I told him that I was like, this, like it's been this long. He just needed to kind of forget it and move on and get over it. And he looked at me like,

it's shocked that I said something. Because usually I just listen or I laugh or something, I laugh or something. I'll contribute somehow. But I was just so exhausted. And my mom and I had worked on our relationships a little bit. I just feel the need to kind of stand up for my mom as well. And he said, listen here, little girl.

And I'm just like, you caught our heart, a little girl, who are you talking to? And he warns me like, I'm a close to snapping. And I was just tired, but why don't you snap and just snap? And I'm kinda yelling at him and he's yelling at me. And he gets a fool. I don't know if fire, he look at his eyes and I'm not that space mask again.

And before I could get the words out, he just means across my job with a piece of wood. And we're on a slope. So I saw backwards. And before I could even think like what just happened, you know, I'm disoriented. And he's on top of me with the six over my throat like a bar.

He's got hand on each side and it's pretty good for him to do the ground like that. While I'm still on the ground, he's screaming at me. He's screaming so hard that his fit is lying on me. He's screaming over and over, this is what it looks like when I'm smacked. This is what it looks like when I'm smacked. And I'm just trying to grab onto the stick and push it off. I'm not very strong, so I'm still down.

So I get up afterwards and let's me up. And yeah, we're just going to go back and pick that fire with like nothing ever happened. I can't even come on, let's go. That day, though, was still not over. A little while later, my dad worked in a cute target practice. There was like a rusty car hood that was up there, and he would put bottles and stuff up there and we would shoot it off. And so we got the guns and he had, at this point, there were two different guns. He had a shotgun, which was to get sort of four kids done and I think it was like a 22-year-old guy. He's on a 22 rifle and so I had to

slung over my shoulder like not really thinking anything about it. I turned around at one point. I just turned around and the barrel of the gun kind of pointed at him from over my shoulder. And he freaked out and was like, don't show the woman gun at me. That's not okay like can he smash the gun and then I was holding him and it settled the ground. And it's really been gun at me and it's commonly as ever. It's a bit to be asking me like, how do you want your extra breath space? Like something like that or the normal question, yeah, because the field I have done in your face. And it doesn't look a lot longer when you're standing at it from that I didn't want to fight for my life, but I didn't want it. God, coward. I didn't want you to feel like you'd won.

So I stood there for about 60 seconds remaining. Raising calls with Crystal last only 15 minutes at a time. And it seems like whenever she's in the middle of her counting a poignant life event, we get cut off. And she has to call back. I'm like, there are all these things that I wanted to say, like, I wanted to challenge him and I wanted to cut some scream and I, there were all these things that I wanted to do, but I guess I did better. Um, I didn't want to push somebody that is all killed here as he was. So I stood there and my head, uh, I'm just trying to look brave and I closed my eyes

because I said I'm going to look a lot longer from that and it's so close to your face. So I just, I closed my eyes and waited for whatever was about to happen. And things didn't even go off. And I feel it's more spreading down my legs. And I was thinking, did he shoot me? Like, that was my first thought. But I was like, well, I don't feel any pain. And I had and he, I mean, is that wasn't there thing?

Job was really loud. So it startled me, he scared me. And so now I'm shaking like I'm trying and far it feels a little strange, but it's clear that I'm not afraid that I'm portraying myself to be. pero es claro que no es un tiempo de traer mis ojos. In the same day, Crystal is hit and choked with a piece of wood and had a shotgun go off beside her. She was trying to be as brave as possible, but she finally realized it might be time to

ask for help. It was a long weekend, so I went back to school. I think it was on a Tuesday. And I was kind of ready to kind of talk to somebody about what was going on because I'm to a point now where I'm beginning to get worried like if something randomly happens to anybody, you're gonna know where I went or what happened.

And I just kind of wanted to see some sort of outside hell, but I'm not, I'm a kid, so I'm not sure where to go what to do. So I talked to my school counselor about the situation. And I told her about the incident with the sick. I left out the mention of any guns, because I knew my dad had a criminal history. I didn't know if you would get in trouble for having guns. Like, I never talked to anybody about that before.

So, I told her about being ill to sick and she saw, you know, the mark on my face. And I told her basically that it scared me. I didn't know what else to say. And they had, I believe, filed a report to through another agency which had connected us to DSS. They told my dad in advance, basically, to be expecting a visit. So we knew it was going to happen.

And my dad had told me beforehand, basically, don't talk to these people because if anything happens and they take you away Like you can end up with a family that's a lot worse than me And then whenever the woman comes over, she checks the smoke detectors in our house and checks the fridge And her and my dad are really friendly. And it seems like she's not taking my case seriously. I was never spoken to privately about anything that happened. I was never even spoken to directly. It was mostly my dad walking her through our house

and showing her like this room and this is that room. Kind of like a real estate agent like showing a house. And then it was over and she left and I never saw it. There were two reports made, one by the Department of Social Services, and the other was a police report filed by Christel's mom, Christina, against Michael for the Wood Incident. But Christel's screams for help would fall on deaf ears.

I felt like I had a lot of faith in the police, but I still had a little bit of hope in the therapy sessions that I'm having, I'm thinking, like, these are people who know me, who would want to help me, but they're also people who think that they know my dad. And so I guess they're torn between like two do we believe, do we believe the trouble teenager or will do we believe this guy who seems to mean well like who we choose in

this situation. And so after this is meant then, I'm beginning to lose faith more and more things in just now. I'm seeing like nobody's listening to me at all. The Department of Social Services and local law enforcement would not be back to the mountaintop home until the worst had happened. In the meantime, life kept trudging along, and Michael was getting back into the dating scene. Mike and James, his buddies back in Georgia, explain. We would still probably communicate once a week.

Yeah, I didn't talk to him as much, but I talked to him. Yeah, we communicated once a week. I mean, it was all about, but we talked about once a week. I thought he dated a lot. He was on plenty of fish. If you've ever heard that. Oh, yes. Even Crystal knew her dad was trying his hand at Internet dating. He had been seeing a woman, but I don't know if he lied about having a daughter or what, but I had come home one night and she was there.

I didn't know that I wasn't supposed to come home. My dad never told me like, they don't come home. Like, so I was trying to show up for my curfew and she was there and she broke up with him. And my dad kind of did have her. This is for me for that one specific woman. He blinded me and said that she didn't want to be with him because I was in trouble.

You and that nobody really wants to be involved in that. And I know he did tell me that a lot. My dad would, would meet people through dating websites, not often, but sporadically. And whatever they would, kind of break things off and he would say, it's because I've got a trick trouble teenager in. Nobody really wants to be involved in that.

Trouble teenager. It was a moniker that Crystal couldn't seem to outrun. So she began to embrace it with the habitual act of shoplifting. Crystal's friends summer and tailor witnessed it first hand. I think it was for the adrenaline attention. I think she might have also wanted to get caught because I kind of got that feeling. There was one point. She stole two full-length ball gowns from a store. Stuck it in a little tiny, little tiny purse.

Like maybe the size of a crayon box. I really don't know how she fit it. And as we were walking out the door, she said, she looked over to me. She was like, if the scanners go off, just keep walking like you don't know me. I was like, what? Okay, so we just keep walking.

Beaver didn't go off. So we get in the car and we're like, what are you talking? And she pulls out to floor-length boggown, like prom dresses from her beer-about Bradley purse. I was like, is this real life right now? What is happening? It's not like she didn't have the means

to buy the things that she wanted. I think it was more of a compulsion at a certain point, where it was just, I see it, I want it. I'm grabbing it. And then I also think it became like a kind of a, can I get away with this? It was an every week thing, not an every, you know, every couple months thing. What do you think she wanted to get caught stealing? Maybe she, it might be attention, so she had some type of attention. It's not the best kind of attention, but it's better than nothing.

I mean, if I guess for somebody who might not have that in their life, anything's better than nothing. in their life, anything's better than nothing. A few months prior, Crystal had been diagnosed with histrionic personality disorder, people with HPD crave attention, and they also have issues with impulse control, which was evident in Crystal's shoplifting ways, but a comment from her dad wouldn't sound very impulsive.

We would sit on the porch and we would talk about all kinds of stuff, but over time those talks had kind of taken a darker aspect. And he had, again, talking about shooting a high-fifters graduation, he was basically like, I finally found opportunities that I wanna take. I know this school from where I used to report for sports things. You know the school you've been there that'll basically like, I want you to help me.

And that caught me off guard because I'm like, not, I'm not thinking at the time like he's actually developing a plan. I've always thought like he's just enrambling, he's been angry. And so to see this plan formulating in the gears in his mind, turning, it scared me because I didn't want to be involved in something like that. So, instead of standing up and being like that's wrong, that's not what we need to do. I just took the coward approach and I just played along and was like, okay, yeah, for sure. And then I ran away. Crystal was doing all she could to stay out of the path of her dad's wrath. So the quote-unquote trouble teen was on the run again. I just picked random things like clothes make up.

Hair started nervous. Random items that I felt I needed um. I had the phone that I think we still shared a phone of this so I took that and I left. So I'm on the internet looking for people to hang out with,

like just anybody, not sure where to go. And this guy messages me and is like, hey, wanna hang out? And I'm like, sure, why not? Like, I need some more to hang out anyway. And he was really late when he picked me up, probably like, two in the morning. So that should have probably raised

or replied, but I'm not thinking of that. I'm just looking for a way out. So I get in the car with him and he saw a five-act two-director on and gets me something to eat. And the next thing I know I wake up in a trailer and another thing.

But at the time, I was not using any drugs. I was not drinking. I just don't know the color of the guy. And so I just McDonald's and drank his drink. So after what I'm thinking, like, is it possible that he could have split something in it? Yeah. But I don't know if they did or not.

I don't have any proof of that. So I'm in this dirty bed. Like it's just, it feels gross and it smells gross. And I'm not wearing clothes. And I just only wait up like, where am I? Like, who had it? I get here. I hear a baby crying in the mixture and I'm like, who had it? I get here. I hear a baby crying in the next

room over and I'm like, who kid is that? Like, I remember getting in the car with this guy and I remember eating the fat food and the next thing I remember is waking up in his bed. So I know when I got in the car with him, there was not a kid in the car. So I remember thinking like, did you leave the kid at home alone? Is there somebody else in the house? Like, basically, I need to contact somebody and tell them where I'm at.

Like, somebody needs to get me. Because I don't know at this point that I'm in another state. My clothes are in a pile across the room. So I put my clothes on and I get my phone out and I paint the location to find a mask. And I was like, I think I might have been raped. Can you come get me?

And at this point, the police are tracking my messages. So they see that and they see the location and they show up at the house. And my first thought is, do I run, do I say, like, what do I do? Because I don't want to go back home. But I'm not sure really the right thing to do. So I just stay and I let the police come in and they escort me out.

They arrest the guy. He's a wife. I just get a wife. I didn't know. Came home in the middle of everything from work. And she'd probably freaking out. They just went to the hospital and they had my dad meet us at the hospital. And after all that was done, my dad took me home.

They released me to my dad immediately. And my dad took me home and They released me to my dad immediately. And my dad took me home, and right away I ran away again. Brenda Annas remembers this dark period in Crystal's life. Crystal was a handful by then because she was rebelling and running away, but she was screaming for help the whole time. That she was doing all these things and nobody recognized it. Did Crystal ever reach out to you directly? No, I wish she had. Many times I wish she had.

Crystal was an evitious cycle of running away, and each time Dad would find her and bring her home again. After the last runaway attempt, Michael checked Crystal into yet another, what she calls mental institution. She was there for six months when her dad pulled her out early. When she returned to Maggie Valley, they had a roommate. Valley, they had a roommate. Her name is Cole. And things weren't good, honestly, like my dad seemed kind of clear headed.

I kind of separated myself from my dad a lot because now he does have that other person that he's spending time with. Mike's never really seemed to have close friends. I don't know how, you know, it was like they were friends and passing, saying to me, I didn't feel that he had close friends of any kind. And I know he did meet a woman up there and she moved in the house but it supposedly was a platonic relationship and you know it turned out bad. I knew he had hatred. I believe he had murder in his heart. He said that you know he would get her on the mountain and nobody would ever see her again.

On the next episode of Killin' Dad, Crystal and Michael's roommate tells all, I don't know what sent him off with my comments, unless he was just a chicken turnbomb. He had these bright, real eyes. And I mean, they were on fire. And sheers an ominous text she received from Crystal's dad, just hours before his murder. At 106, Dalpish and dishonest people

have made me no more than a dead man walking. And I didn't answer back until that night, but then he was already dead. Yeah, I'll be coming home If I be on my name If I just want to know I won't ever gotta be I want all I got to do Up with me in the chair, sir I don't even care now No, it's like a lesson, get my peace

Not this old lonely you