![]() ![]() It’s messy handwriting…it could be someone who was writing with their non-dominant hand, someone intentionally trying to mask their handwriting, or just someone with bad handwriting. We just published for the first time the handwriting that was on the letters. But yeah…I think one thing that made the story so intriguing to people is it does feel like it should be able to be solved. I was able to approach it a little bit objectively. For obvious reasons, this became the thing that their entire lives revolved around, and they had to do a lot of work to even move on from that. I would never claim to have gotten in as deep as they did. As a reporter, how obsessed did you get with the story? The Broadduses understandably became obsessed with figuring out who The Watcher is. Westfield, like any town, is a place where people like to gossip about the biggest story in town. ![]() Initially what we were doing was trying to figure out how people felt about living next door to this house, or living in the same town. And then trying to talk to people in the town. That included people who had investigated the case, some of the people that the Broadduses had hired. It was a process of spending a lot of time talking to the Broadduses, of course, and then trying to get people who knew something to talk. Because they had never spoken to the press before, and there had been a lot of speculation about what had happened on all sides. But it was also clear once I spoke to them that the only version of the story that needed to be done at that point was one sharing their side. And they were still trying to figure this out. They were still dealing with people in town being very critical of them and the decisions they had made. But they still owned the house and were trying to figure out how to get rid of it and move on from that. By the time I had gotten to them, they weren’t worried about The Watcher really coming after them in the way they were in at the beginning. ![]() It was clear to me from the first time I met Derek and Maria Broaddus that this had been a truly traumatic experience for them and that even, years later, by the time I was talking to them, this was something that was still very difficult for them. How did you go about gaining the trust of the family? Let’s go see if we can try to figure out what happened and, if we can't do that, let’s see what it’s like to live in a town and be around a story like this. Maybe six months after that, we kind of had this idea of, “Hey, that weird mystery never got resolved. She had this idea after the story had initially had its viral moment in 2015, after the lawsuit that the Broadduses had filed had been made public. The idea to do the story came from Alexis Swerdloff, who is an editor at New York Magazine. In anticipation of the true-crime adaptation, VF spoke to Wiedeman about his experience reporting the story, whether The Watcher targeted him, and his hopes for the case finally being solved. On Thursday, Murphy’s limited series based on Wiedeman’s feature premieres, with Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale appearing as the Broadduses’ fictionalized proxies, the Brannocks. The New York Magazine article recounting this traumatic chapter of the family’s lives was so haunting, in fact, that it incited a six-studio bidding war-with Ryan Murphy, the American Horror Story and Dahmer mastermind, ultimately winning the rights for a Netflix series. I could only imagine how the Broadduses felt getting these letters.” “It’s hard even reading them as someone who these weren’t sent to. The letters “are truly freaky, creepy things,” explains Reeves Wiedeman, the New York Magazine features writer who gained the family’s trust to write 2018’s “The Watcher,” which detailed their saga and the ensuing investigation into The Watcher’s identity. Look at all the windows you can see from 657 Boulevard. ![]() The messages were also peppered with unsettling phrases like “bring me young blood” and “let the party begin.” Another teased, “There are hundreds and hundreds of cars that drive by 657 Boulevard each day. The Watcher knew the names of their children, the make of their cars, and even the fact that their youngest child had drawn on an easel in a side room of the house. The Broadduses and their three young children hadn’t even moved in-they never would-but The Watcher soon cited haunting specifics about their family in follow-up letters. Within three days of closing on the 1905 Dutch colonial, for which they paid nearly $1.4 million, the family received a letter from someone called “The Watcher,” who claimed to have been “put in charge of watching” the home. It has been eight years now since Derek and Maria Broaddus bought the six-bedroom home in Westfield, New Jersey, that would change their lives. ![]()
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