James turned out to be our key. Or rather, his pyjamas. Sometimes you do not see something that is right in front of your eyes, until it clicks.

Everything was related to sleep. It did not make sense at first - they had jumped from roofs, stepped in front of trains, were murdered or had accidents. But once it clicked, all the pieces fit together. In a few cases we had no evidence, like Sasha on her commute, but she got off at a stop two after her usual exit and might well have fallen asleep on the train. But in the vast majority of the cases, people had been in bed shortly before they became suicidal or homicidal. Maybe they never even woke up? All the suicide attempt survivors seemed puzzled about what had happened to them. All of them, and many of the victims, had attempted suicide at night. This had never raised any flags before, because most suicides indeed happen at night. But the totality of this pattern when linked to Robert was statistically unlikely. Looking at the whole picture, only three of the deaths occurred during day and in all three of them we were reasonably sure that the victims had taken at least a nap.

I felt like Sherlock Holmes, who famously said: „How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?“

Robert, somehow, could make people kill themselves, or others, in their sleep.

How he accomplished that, we had not the slightest clue.

We could not possibly hope to get a warrant based on that, so we dug deeper. We confirmed the links on our wall, and gathered possible evidence. We came up empty. Our only somewhat plausible theory on the method was some kind of slow-acting drug. None of the autopsies had found anything like that, but it was not entirely impossible that an unknown substance, or one that decays rapidly after death, could have been involved. And while it was a long stretch, at least it was a theory.

The survivors made us dig through medical records. The evidence collected so far and our theory on an unknown psychoactive drug was enough, barely but enough, to convince a judge to sign the necessary paperwork. We could not dig deep, but we found three more victims of Robert, people we could link to him, who were alive but in psychological care. The woman had spent a night with Robert, but according to friends we interviewed rejected further romantic approaches. One of the men had tried to shoot his neighbour with a shotgun, and it turned out that this neighbour had just won a minor court case against our man. Something about an oldtimer car, not much by dollars but apparently of some sentimental value to Robert. The third one we could not figure out, but he and our man seemed to have frequented the same bars, maybe something happened there?

We could not figure out how Robert could have possibly drugged the neighbour. He was a pensioner who rarely left the house. He didn’t know Robert and other neighbours described him as withdrawn and mistrusting. No plausible scenario would have made him take a drink or snack from our man at the door, and according to the file there was no evidence that anyone else had been in the house. In fact, according to the pictures, not for weeks and definitely not for cleaning.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

It started as a joke, but to remember Sherlock Holmes again, in the end we had no other working theory. Whatever Roberts game was, it affected the mind as evidenced by our mental patients and the claims of the suicide survivors. No physical force or presence had been involved in any of them.

Our research led us to hypnosis as the only rational explanation. There seem to be techniques that can put a victim into hypnosis in seconds, and even though we were not sure if these were real or stage trickery, we had run out of other explanations. All the evidence led us to the conclusion that our man could somehow implant subconscious orders into a victims mind, which they would then act out when they were asleep, when the conscious mind was switched off.

Nothing we could tell to a judge, but in all the cases we had not one where the acting person was definitely awake at the time they killed or attempted to kill either themselves or someone else. Not one. All of them were either certainly or likely asleep.

So we instead took our drug story to the judge and got a search and arrest warrant. The arrest was hard to get, because the search should have been enough, but we argued that due to the substance in question being unknown, collecting the evidence could be a difficult undertaking during which the suspect might likely disappear. He had moved four times in the past decade, and had no immediate family.

Among ourselves, we worried about protecting ourselves. None of us wanted to end up on the victim list and no matter how fantastical our theories sounded, none of us could answer the challenge to come up with a better explanation.

And many of the victims, as far as we could figure it out, had in one way or the other harmed or hurt our man. Rejected him, humiliated him, damaged his career or his relations, or maybe just hurt his pride. For some victims we had no clear indication, similar things were at least imaginable. It was a long stretch, but it was the only one that we had left. If we were right, he would certainly consider the people who arrested him to be of the same kind.

None of us believed in telepathy and mind control. That was only temporary terms that we used as our alternative last-ditch theory in case the hypnosis idea turned out to be wrong. A placeholder term to name what we could not yet explain. But the more we used these terms, the more they appeared probable. And if you allow for the possibility that he was somehow psychic, it opens the idea that he might even do it unintentionally.

That is why we began to call him „the dreamer“, and when we arrested him, we took great care to always have him in our sights, to never be with him alone, and to avoid eye contact as much as possible. We worked under the assumption that he can manipulate us through a technique we did not know and as such could not hope to spot. We even got hypnosis to protect us against hypnosis, despite half of us thinking that was just a joke taken too far.