Creepiest mall event ever

If the 400-pound guy in the photo gives you the creepers, you don't know the half of it yet. This is James Julius Beaudrie, now in court after a nationwide manhunt, charged with multiple counts of child molestation and child endangerment, having methodically molested three of his nine children on a continuing basis.

The remarkable thing is the circumstances surrounding the incidents. In the first place, the wife of James and mother of the children, Kijua Beaudrie, was not only complicit in the molestation, but actively aided the father by, for instance, sequestering the other kids in another room while the abuse was going on. For this, she's getting 30 years in prison.

But wait, it gets creepier! Kijua actually kept a diary of the abuse while she heard her own children sobbing in the other room.

But wait, it gets even creepier! All of this was going on in the back of a store at the Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines, Iowa.

That's right here in my home town, and I and my family have been shopping there for years. The mall, as with many malls across post-recession America, has a few stores dark and empty with bleak 'for lease' signs in the windows. So now we're thinking back on all the times we've gone shopping at that mall, and not known that meanwhile, in the back of one of the rooms...