S1 E1: "Where's the gun Julie?"

The following episode is based on my first-hand experiences and what I have personally witnessed, along with information I have received directly from other witnesses involved in my story. This is my lived experience, my story, documented over three-plus years through police reports, court filings, social media videos, and other publicly available information. For privacy and safety, I am not using real names for my stalker, and I have changed names and details where appropriate. I will never reveal the names or identifying details of anyone under the age of 18 in this episode or in any other episode. All individuals referenced are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. [Music] She stole food delivery off my front porch, and when I confronted her about it, she texted me back saying, "Where's the gun, Julie?" That's where this season begins, but it's not where this whole story starts, so I need to take you back. Back before that text message, back before the TikTok videos, back before anyone knew this story existed outside of my neighborhood. My name is Julie. I used to live in Houston, Texas. I'm a mom. I'm a researcher. I'm an entrepreneur. I've run a roofing company, an online crystal shop. I even had a blog years ago, and unfortunately, I'm the central character in a true crime case most people didn't want to believe was real. I tried to tell my story in real time in TikTok on 2022. Some of you might remember it. You might have even watched it unfold in real time, but my videos were mass-reported, taken down, I was silenced, and meanwhile, the violence escalated. After over three years of documenting all of the psychological abuse, the online harassment, the physical threats, the violence, I'm finally ready to tell the truth. I'm ready to speak out, and this time, it's going to be on my terms. The story you're about to hear is a true story. I witnessed it firsthand. I've interviewed other witnesses, and I have the receipts to prove every single claim that I'm going to make. Before all of this, there was Michael, my husband, and the woman I'll call Darla. That's not a real name, but it's the one I'm using for the story. Michael and Darla lived next door to each other for more than two years before they started dating in October of 2020. He told me they moved pretty fast, that she introduced him to her children right away. They carved pumpkins on Halloween. Her children even came over for popsicles and ice cream all the time. Even though they agreed it was supposed to be casual, he said it got serious quickly. But by early December, Michael started noticing red flags, and he broke it off with her. And apparently, she didn't take it well. At that time, Michael had loaned Darla his Black Ford Fusion Hybrid. When he asked for it back, she refused. And what happened next, ended with a police call. Michael told me he went to her front door to ask for his keys back. But instead of coming outside, she opened the window and talked to him from her front patio. She had her phone in her hand recording him for TikTok. He said he grabbed the phone out of her hand and told her, "You can have this back when you give me back my car." Then he walked away. But Darla came out her front door and followed him across the yard. When he reached his own patio, she picked up one of the white landscaping rocks from his flower bed and threw it at him. This was December 6th of 2020. Michael ended up calling the police because she wouldn't return his car and had started throwing rocks at him. But when the officer arrived, Darla flipped a story. She told him Michael hit her, that he assaulted her. They cuffed him and made him sit down. But after interviewing both of them, the officer realized she was lying. They uncuffed Michael and no one was arrested that night. Because the car had been legally loaned to her, the officer told Michael she had 10 days to return it to him. But a couple of weeks later, just before Christmas, Michael finally took matters into his own hands. He said he used his spare key, walked over to her driveway, got into his parked car, started it, and drove away. And as he pulled off, Darla came out her front door running and yelling at him. But he kept going. He said he parked his car somewhere safe to keep it away from her for a little while. On New Year's Eve, they hooked up again. This time, though, he says they agreed to just be friends with benefits. They were not going to date each other. They were just going to be casual friends with benefits. He said it was easy. He said they lived right next door to each other, so it was convenient for him. But by early February of 2021, Michael started seeing other women, too. An old flame of his will call her Megan. She came to town and stayed with him at his house for a weekend. It was one of the weekends that he went to go stay at his family's ranch house for his dad's birthday. While he was gone, she noticed his roofing ladder was missing. She sent him a text message asking him where it was because she was trying to hang a swing from the tree in his backyard. And just to give you some context here of why Michael even had a ladder like that. At this time, Michael was working for me at my roofing company. And I bought that ladder for him so he could climb roofs. It wasn't cheap. It was pretty expensive. On February 8th, Michael discovered that both of his bike and ladder were gone and he calls the police. He reports both of them stolen. The investigation led straight to Darla. She had pawned both items. It was a total value of $1,900. She'd pawned them out of first cash pawn in Houston, Texas. A witness actually saw her in Michael's backyard with her daughter. It was a man that lived across the street. And according to the court records, which are public, they show she was charged with a misdemeanor theft and that she even pled guilty and was sentenced to 30 days in jail. And I think she only served about a week. Darla was ordered to commence her sentence in April of 2021. After she got out of jail, she apologized to Michael. He said she wrote him an apology letter. And after she apologized to him, he said he felt sorry for that he believed her and he started hooking up with her again. But this time, he wasn't just seeing her. He was also trying to rekindle a relationship with his ex-girlfriend who we're going to call Ashley. He was seeing both Darla and Ashley at the same time, sometimes in the same day, for months. It actually went on until about August of 2021. That's when Darla told Michael that she was falling for him and she actually broke it off with him. Michael said he was totally fine with it, that he didn't care at all, that he wasn't serious for him with Darla, that he was just hooking up with her at this point, and that he was seeing Ashley, so he didn't care. In October is actually when he and I started hanging out as more than just friends. I invited him to go with me to a wedding. Michael and I go way back. We first met in 2009 when we were living in the same apartment complex near the Galleria in Houston. We hung out almost daily for over a year. We even tried dating, but we stayed friends after things didn't work out between us. We reconnected in August of 2019, and by the spring of 2020, he was working for me at my roofing company. In October of 2021, he invited me to the Houston Music and Arts Festival, and later that month, he went with me to Mexico for a wedding. One night during that trip, he kissed me out of nowhere. We sat down and had a long talk about our history, our friendship, and how we were finally both ready to settle down. That's when we decided to try again, but this time with intention. We called it our date to marry era. Then Thanksgiving rolls around, November 25th. Michael and I went over to my aunt's house in League City and had a really good time. It was actually the first time he had seen my family in over 10 years. And then on November 27th, Michael tells me that Darla stole his outer wall recently. He said on November 20th, he got an alert from the pharmacy letting him know that his outer wall was ready for pickup. But right after he got that text from the pharmacy, Darla sent him a text saying that she picked it up. Please don't be mad. And then Michael said he called up at the pharmacy and the pharmacist described a person who looked exactly like Darla. Said that she walked in there, provided his name, his date of birth and address. Said that Michael told her to go up there and pick up his medication and they released it to her. And when I asked Michael if he called the police and reported her, he said no. When I asked him why, he said he felt bad, said he didn't want to be the reason that a mother lost custody of her kids. So after he tells me that, then he decides to remind me about how Darla's already served jail time for stealing his bike and ladder and pawning it at a local pawn shop earlier that year. She's already been convicted of stealing the bike and ladder. And she's now admitted in text message that she's stolen his Adderall and picked it up from a pharmacy. So what do I do? Of course, I order security cameras. I got on Amazon right away and I started buying security cameras to put around the perimeter of our house. I ordered the blink video doorbell and I bought five other blink cameras to go around the perimeter of our house. They shipped on December 4th. I got them in two days and we installed them right away. On December 22nd of 2021, I ordered Nifah's Mexican food on Uber Eats. But before I could grab it off my front porch, my blink video app went off. And when I opened the app, the first thing I saw was a woman who I've never seen before in my life walking up to my front porch. And then I see her grab my food, turn around and walk away with it in the direction of the house directly next door to us. After I saw that video, I walked on the back patio where Michael was always working on his dirt bike. And I showed him the blink video footage and asked him who that was. He responded with, "That's Darla." And that's when I realized the neighbor he dated, she was living right next door. Then Michael pulls his phone out of his pocket. He's got a bunch of missed calls and text messages from a 504 area code, which is not a Houston number. Her number started with an 832. I asked him to hand me his phone so I can get the phone number out of it. And then I called it. No answer. But there's an automated message and this is when I learned that she's using a TextNow app to call and text Michael. Over and over and over again because he had her 832 number blocked. So that's when I decided to text her. I sent her a text with something along the lines of, "If you're not going to bring the food back, can you at least give it to your kids?" And then her reply was something like, "Girl, why are you texting me about food with a bunch of laughing face emojis? Don't speak about my children." And then I replied with, "You literally just stole food off of my front porch. I caught it on my camera." And then her response to that was, "Where's the gun, Julie?" The gun wasn't even mine. It belongs to a family member. And the only reason that it was in Michael's house is because in the summer of 2021, I called Michael and asked him to go pick it up from my family member. He told me he was keeping it in his dresser drawer and I believed him. But what I didn't know at the time was that he was still seeing Darla, the person who was already convicted of stealing a bike and ladder and potting it. When I showed him the text message that she sent me asking where the gun was, he acted like he was in complete denial. He said that there was no way that she would steal a gun from his house. He didn't think that she was capable of doing that. He said she was crazy, but he didn't think that she would ever go that far. But I knew my intuition was never wrong. And so what I did was I ran back to the back bedroom. I opened up the dresser drawer where he said he was keeping it and it was gone. Then I tore the whole house apart. I looked everywhere. That gun was nowhere in that house. Then the New Year rolls around and on January 3rd of 2022, Darla shows up on my front porch slurring her words and yelling through our windows that Michael better not fuck with her kids. This is on January 3rd of 2022 at 8.54 p.m. It is a Monday night. Michael just got back from riding his bicycle to the bodega. It's a little corner store that he went to all the time down the street to buy beer. Darla frequented that store as well to buy wine and cigarettes. When Michael was coming back on his bicycle from picking up beer, he told me he saw her two children way down the street in the dark on their scooters unsupervised. Mind you, this is almost nine o'clock at night. So when she comes over to our front porch and starts screaming through the window, Michael opens the front window and starts responding back to her. He's telling her that her kids are way down the street, that she's not even watching them, and she doesn't care. She starts yelling over him. She starts arguing with him. Michael's passivity is not doing anything. She's not leaving. She's not going away like he's telling her to. So that's when I realized I'm going to have to step in. So I get up off the couch, walk over to the front door, open it, step out onto my front porch, walk towards Darla and tell her get off my property now. I continue to walk towards her and she starts walking backwards towards her property line. I walked her all the way over to her property line. I don't know exactly what she was saying because I was talking over her the whole time that she was trying to talk over me. I was telling her that he doesn't want anything to do with you. He's moved on. Leave us alone. You're harassing us. You're stalking us. Don't ever step foot on my property again. And she looked at me and said your property and started smiling and laughing. And then she said, isn't this his dad's house? Like that gave her any reason to step foot on our property and accuse Michael of child abuse. What Darla didn't know at the time was that Michael and I were already engaged. He actually proposed to me the day before Christmas Eve on December 23rd of 2021. So I wasn't just some girlfriend visiting my boyfriend. We were engaged and I was living there at that time. And so when she came over and was hollering at Michael through the front porch, she was also coming over and violating my boundaries too. The very next day on January 4th of 2022, Michael gets a text message from the neighbor down the street who I'm going to call Amanda. She tells Michael that Darla's on her TikTok, posting lies about him and smearing me, calling me a crackhead, completely lying about the whole interaction from that night before. So I decided to get back on TikTok. And when I say get back on TikTok, I had an old TikTok account that I used to log into just to view videos. I wasn't a creator. I wasn't somebody that got on TikTok and posted videos for attention. That just wasn't me. So when I log back into my TikTok, I look at her account. And the first thing I notice is that she's got a pretty large following. At the time, I think she had around 120,000 followers. And as I'm scrolling through her videos, I'm trying to understand why she has so many followers. Why are all of these people following this person? I mean, she's coming over to my house and accusing Michael of child abuse just weeks after asking me where the gun is that's been missing from my house. She's also admitted to stealing his Adderall. So how is this person on TikTok with all of these followers? It didn't make sense to me. So I start going through her videos and I start seeing video after video of her smearing her ex-husband over and over and over again, making crazy accusations. There was accusations on there of parental alienation, of child abuse, of sexual abuse. There were all kinds of crazy accusations on there and it just didn't sit right with me. She had built this platform on victimhood, on smearing this man for years. And that's when I thought to myself, there is no way in hell that I'm going to let this person make me the next victim of her smear campaign. So that's when I decided to start posting. I started sharing my receipts. I posted the video footage of her stealing the food off my front porch. And whenever I did that, she responded. Not only did she try to respond and cover it up, she posted a fake DoorDash receipt from Chewy's. The problem with that is I didn't even order on DoorDash. I used Uber Eats and I didn't order Chewy's. It was Nymphas. So what I did was posted the real Uber Eats receipt. Everything that she was accusing me of doing, I had proof that it was actually her doing it. And once I realized how sloppy she was, like when she posted the DoorDash Chewy's receipt when it was supposed to be Uber Eats and Nymphas instead, I tried to do a little bit of reverse psychology. I posted a video. It was super vague and I said something like, "I have the ring camera footage from the neighbor across the street. I know what you did." And that was it. No context. No accusation. I didn't name her name. I didn't say anybody's name. And what did she do in response? Her reaction? She posted a video on her TikTok saying that she turned in the gun. And then she goes on to say that she's terrified of me. I'm going to say it. I've already given the police the gun that I had to wrestle away from you. I've already given it to them. They already have all the information they need. You're going to get the help that you need. You're terrifying me. You need to get off of social media and you need to get help. Right after I watched Darla's video where she admitted to turning in the gun, I called my family member, the person who actually owns the gun. I asked her to send me a picture of the outside of the box so I could get the serial number off of it and she does. Then I call the Houston Police Department and I report the gun stolen. I tell them what my next door neighbor just posted on TikTok that she turned in the gun. I also remind them that back in December of 2021, I called them and reported the gun missing after she sent me a text message asking me where the gun was. I just didn't have the serial number at the time. So they put me on hold for a second and when they come back, they confirm the gun has officially been turned in. It was turned in on January 4th of 2022 at 22.38, 10.38 p.m. Over the next couple of months, I don't stop bringing up the gun on TikTok. I want answers. I want to know why Houston Police is not prosecuting her. I reported it missing. She turns it in. I reported it stolen. I show them the video that she posted, admitting that she turned it in. Since I wasn't letting it go on TikTok, Darla's followers, they started questioning her. One of Darla's followers, who I'm going to name Samantha, posts screenshots of her private conversation with Darla. And in the screenshot, Samantha is texting Darla and she says, "You good, mama?" She's saying they're having you arrested currently for stealing their gun. She's talking about me. Darla responds with, "She attacked me with it the other day and I was able to get it from her. Michael came and grabbed her like I've never handled a gun before, but I was so scared and promised I wouldn't report." I, of course, did. She's dead in the water. I took it to the police today. And then Samantha responds with, "She's also claiming you didn't make a report in all this stuff. I hope you have the police on your side." Darla responds with, "No worries. Seriously, love you. Don't worry. I got this." Samantha responds, "Yeah, they said they reported it stolen and now that you turned it in, you're going to get a felony, LOL." Darla responds with, "Everything fell right where it needed to." Samantha says, "What did the police say?" And then Darla sends her a video. And below the video, Darla says, "That was the video. Someone knocked on my door at, like, 11 p.m. It was sus, so I turned the camera on." And then Samantha responds with, "Man, you need to go to the store and get front and back cameras today." And then Darla responded with, "Should I post that video? I'm at Best Buy now." And that was it. Samantha uploads that to her TikTok. And it doesn't stay up for long. Apparently Darla was pretty upset that her friend Samantha posted those because Samantha took them down pretty quick after that. Then people started wanting to know what the video was that Darla sent Samantha. So Darla posts it. And when she first posts it, there was no timestamp on it. And the video itself is supposed to represent a home invasion with the gun that she had just turned into the police. I'm going to try to explain or describe the video the best way that I can, but you really need to watch it for yourself. So in the video, she's already pressed record before somebody allegedly knocks to which she replies with, "Coming." And then you see whoever's holding the phone walking over to the front door. But then the video camera starts jolting and shaking back and forth. You can't really make out what's going on on the screen, but you can hear what I think is supposed to represent a struggle. And then you hear a thud on the ground, which to me sounds like a phone hitting the floor. And then the screen goes black. And that's it. She posts that video on her TikTok and tells everybody that the attacker in that video is me, but people aren't buying it. People start accusing her of just now making the video and uploading it right then and there. So then she posts the video again, but this time she has posted the video after she's screen recorded the same video showing the timestamp on the video. And the timestamp on the video was supposed to be the time of the alleged attack. And it shows the date January 4th of 2022 at 10.22 p.m. I submitted that video the very next day to the Harris County District Attorney's Office. Got nothing in response. I've also sent them video proof of all of her TikTok videos where she changes her story three to four times as to how she ever got into possession of the gun in the first place. No response. I actually reached out to the Houston Police Department property room here recently. I reminded them that I called and reported the gun missing in 2021. I said it was turned in on January 4th of 2022, and I reported it stolen on January 5th of 2022. And I gave him the serial number. He put me on hold for a second, came back, and he said, "Yep, it's here." And then he said that they were holding it in relation to an armed robbery case. He was talking about when Darla turned in the gun. When she turned in the gun, she told the police that she was a victim of armed robbery. So after the police officer looked up the report that she filed and then also looked up the report that I filed of the gun missing and then also the report that I filed the gun stolen. That's when he told me he will go ahead and release the gun. He said that the person who owns the gun just needs to call him and he's going to grant a property release. Now here's what I know. The Houston Police Department property room where the gun was turned into and logged into is at 1202 Washington Avenue in Houston, Texas. It's downtown where the alleged attack occurred was approximately at Bunker Hill in I-10. From Bunker Hill in I-10 to the Houston Police Department property room in downtown Houston, it's about an 18 to 24 minute drive. According to Darla, the alleged home invasion took place at 10.22 p.m. But the gun was logged into the property room at 10.38 p.m. exactly 16 minutes after. Is it possible for her to have been attacked at 10.22 p.m., run out her back door, drive to a gas station, wait on Houston police officers, hand the police officers the gun, and the police officers have the gun turned into the evidence room, all within 16 minutes. Join me next week as we talk about how she got away with forgery, property damage, and criminal mischief. Every statement in this episode is my opinion based on facts. The podcast is my testimony, but the vault, that's where the evidence lives. Unlock the vault today at BehindTheFalseLight.com for just $7 a month. Get exclusive access to the Private Discord channel and be the first to see every receipt. I'm your host, Julie Albanese, and you've been listening to Behind the False Light. [Music]