My name is Victor Salkind.

This story begins in 1995 with a burial in the forest.

I was burying on that night in June I won't tell you because I won't be judged by who I was during that time.

A scared 22-year-old feeling cornered and making stupid decisions.

All you need to know is that it was four in the morning.

I was outside a town called Lavily, Missouri, 30 miles west of where I lived.

And only one other person in the world knew why I was there or what I was doing.

I'd picked the spot out on a map and thought, here.

This seems like a place where no one would ever go.

This is where I'm going to do this.

After I finished the deed I was sweating, exhausted my head was throbbing.

I had eaten for two days, had slept for 24 hours, sick with worry.

There I was tamping the earth down with a shovel, praying I had done a good job, begging to God to give me the chance to get out of this and make things different.

I was about to head back to the woods about a mile to where I left my car beside an agricultural preserve when I heard the sound.

My sense of distance and direction was corrupted by the wind and my panic and my disorientation.

My first thought was that the sound came from maybe a half mile away.

A tremendous splitting and cracking of wood, but not one or two trees.

Now many of them dozens, maybe.

Snapping like firecracker snap. All at once.

I almost have a heart attack right there and then I swear at it, age 22.

It went on for ten seconds and then it ended very suddenly.

I thought Jesus, they're doing construction on something nearby of all places, but it just couldn't be.

...