The Case of Chad Goodwell
This casefile was compiled by Alva Keel through witness interviews and observations conducted by SQ.
A woman named Gretchen Albright was tragically strangled with a tape measure one night after she let what she thought was a repairman into her residence. Amongst her personal effects the police found a journal with the disturbing words, "God is Nowhere" written inside it, and a drawing of a man named Paul Callan. This is how my organization was drawn back into the case of Hemography and the murders committed by an extremely mentally disturbed college student named Chad Goodwell.
The next day, Mr. Callan and I were both approached by a Detective Krantz of the Boston Police Department with questions about Mrs. Albright. I told him what I knew - that Gretchen Albright was one of six people whom I had interviewed previously as they had all experienced hemography. Hemography is a paranormal phenomena where blood, free of the body, forms itself into legible words, either by dripping onto a surface or by being soaked into an absorbent material, such as a bandage or a towel. These six people all saw the same message written in their own blood - "God is Nowhere." Mrs. Albright had cut her hand on a broken mixing bowl and used a towel to stop the bleeding. When she looked at the towel a few minutes later, there were the words on the bloody cloth - "God is Nowhere." A few of the six persons also saw, "Help Us" as a companion blood message. I wrote an article on this phenomena about one of the "Help Us" messages that had appeared on a bloody bandage for The Journal of Psychical Research in 1996.
It troubled Mr. Callan that his hemography message ("God is Now Here") had been different from the others, although it seemed a bit more positive. He believed that I was keeping information from him, and took it upon himself to find the hemography files and comb through them personally. I must admit that there were several bombshells in those files, and I was keeping them from Mr. Callan until such a time that I felt he would be ready to confront the information contained within them. Instead, he found the data himself. The experience almost caused him to leave SQ.
What he found in those files was that the majority of the "God is Nowhere" people had vividly dreamed about him before and/or after their own hemography experience. Each person stated that the dreams had been so real, and felt so important to them, that they had written down all the details as soon as they had awakened. Several of these dreams contained very personal details about Mr. Callan's life, although none of these people had ever met him before. Examples include dreams of serious childhood illnesses, and even the incident where Tommy Ferguson healed Mr. Callan.
Using the information in those files, he tracked down the six persons as best he could, only to find out that four of them had already been murdered, just like Gretchen Albright. We did not know that this killer was Chad Goodwell, but we would soon find out.
Two people were still alive at the time - Danielle Franklin and Kenneth Webster, who had changed his name after his hemography experience. Mr. Callan was determined to attempt to save these last two, so he boarded a plane for Denver, Colorado to contact Mrs. Franklin in person. Unbeknownst to him at the time, Chad Goodwell had already arrived in Denver and had bought a rifle in town. I did not know that Mr. Callan had become involved to this degree; I advised against it, since we knew so little about the killer's motives. For all we knew, Mr. Callan was next on his list. Once the Boston police became involved in these new developments, Ms. Santos reported what she knew - that Mr. Callan had gone to Denver.
Authorities in Colorado took Mr. Callan into custody for questioning when he had barely departed the plane. He did have a chance to call Danielle Franklin and leave a message on her answering machine before the police picked him up. Somehow, Chad found out where Mrs. Franklin would be that afternoon (there was evidence that someone had broken into her residence, so he may have found out her schedule from going through her belongings). As she headed for her car, she called Mr. Callan at the police station; he told her she should come to the station immediately for her own safety. Unfortunately, Mrs. Franklin was intercepted by Chad Goodwell in the parking lot. He shot her, killing her instantly.
In the meantime, I had obtained a writ of habeas corpus for Mr. Callan to have him released from police custody; the authorities wanted to detain him because of his advance knowledge of Mrs. Franklin's murder. Before we could even exit the police station, a detective informed us that someone had been picked up with a pocket full of Mrs. Franklin's credit cards. It was assumed that this was the killer, but this later was revealed to be erroneous. The man eventually confessed to having stolen the cards from Mrs. Franklin's purse within minutes of her murder.
I gave Mr. Callan the information he needed to find the last surviving "God is Nowhere" person. There were two possible locations for his new residence, and Mr. Callan was determined to check them both out. He was very upset with me over recent events, especially as he did not know my motivation for starting SQ. Therefore, I decided to relate to Mr. Callan the story of why I started this organization, in an effort to show to him how serious I was about our quest for truth.
While I was a senior in college, studying medicine at Cambridge University, I chose to decode the language of bird song as my senior project for my minor, linguistics. For several days, I recorded and then transcribed the notes and patterns in the utterances of the English Field Raven, in order to discern the basics of their language. It was late November, 1985, when I found that on the fifth day of said recordings, the sounds on my tapes were different. Amongst the bird calls, I heard voices, including the voice of my deceased mother. The phenomena of hearing meaningful sounds, such as voices, in otherwise random stimuli is called auditory pareidolia; when it has been recorded, it is also known as electronic voice phenomena (EVP). EVP also refers to hearing voices amongst other types of electronic stimuli, such as static and telephone hum. Auditory pareidolia is considered by most skeptics to be a form of hallucination, that the wishful thinking of the listener determines what they actually hear. The mind always seeks to organize sensory input into something coherent. While I fully understand where the skepticism comes from, this experience had still placed me firmly on a path to find the truth; did I really hear the voice of my dead mother on that tape? Was Mr. Callan really healed by Tommy Ferguson? These are the types of questions we seek to answer at SQ. Sometimes it only takes a single word from a mysterious recording to change the course of a lifetime. All I could do was leave this information with Mr. Callan and hope it would quiet his doubts about my motives.
In another unfortunate occurrence, Chad Goodwell was still at large, and he found the actual residence of Kenneth Webster first, now living in Estacada, Oregon. Mr. Callan arrived to find Chad already in the house, with Mr. Webster not at home. They spoke for only a few minutes before Mr. Webster returned to his residence, and Chad immediately struck Mr. Callan in the face with an iron. This temporarily knocked Mr. Callan unconscious.
When Mr. Callan regained consciousness several minutes later, Chad was attempting to bludgeon Mr. Webster to death with the same iron. Mr. Callan struggled with him until he had subdued Chad, thus saving Mr. Webster's life.
Both Chad and Mr. Callan were taken in by the local police while the situation was still being sorted out. At the station, Chad was sadly able to grab one of the policeman's guns and take his own life, his last words being that his mother should be told he was sorry.
We may never know why Chad Goodwell committed these murders against a group of people simply because they shared a paranormal experience. The secret may have died with this young man who seemed to be quite out of his mind.
This case remains open.
ADDENDUM:
Some months after the subject of this casefile took place, Mr. Callan finally revealed to me what was said during the conversation he had had with Chad Goodwell in the back of the police car that night in Estacada, Oregon. Chad claimed that the "voice of God" had told him to kill the "God is Nowhere" people because they were all somehow "evil." He claimed he had had a hemography experience six months prior, where he saw the same words Mr. Callan had seen, "God is Now Here," after which he began to receive visits from Tommy Ferguson, also. Interestingly, Chad stated that Tommy's visits started before the child had even died. Tommy and the "voice of God" informed Chad that there were nine people total who had seen the "God is Nowhere" message. Because Chad Goodwell's chance to finish this "work" was over, he symbolically passed the duty over to Mr. Callan, telling him that because he had also seen "God is Now Here," it was up to him now to finish off the rest of the persons who had seen the words differently.
Chad Goodwell's ramblings can only be taken as insane, and Mr. Callan has no intention of acting on them. What happened to Chad Goodwell? Was he really manipulated into committing these crimes by a supernatural force, and if so, what? Very little of the information about the "God is Nowhere" cases was ever published (my own article was about the "Help Us" messages), so how did he obtain this arcane knowledge? It would be of great help to us, and probably to the three other "God is Nowhere" persons, if they really exist, if they would contact SQ as soon as possible. We can answer many of your questions. Others have had the same experience you have. Please contact SQ by post, phone, or E-mail. If you have any other information that could help us sort out the details of this case, please do the same.
For related cases, please see: Callan, Paul; Hemography; F., Tommy
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