Episode 5: Becoming Warhead

November 18, 2019·1 hr 6 min·5 clips

Ben Faulkner says he'd do it all again because being Warhead made him feel powerful and accepted.

Emily met Ben Faulkner in college. She asked if they were dating, he said yes, and their lives started to look like a relationship. They spent plenty of time together. He met her parents. She visited his place in North Bay. At first, the memory has an almost everyday feel, which is part of what makes the turn so hard to shake. Faulkner then shifts to one of his students, a girl he says was about twelve. He knows the language he uses sounds sinister, and the account soon proves why. A rainy Friday begins the rides. The girl asks for a lift home, and he says yes. He presents it as help, but even his own telling has a nervous looseness to it. The rides continue. They turn into beach trips and meals out with the girl and her siblings, all without the parents knowing. One girl holds his attention. Faulkner says things began getting out of hand, including messages he sent while drunk at a bar. He knew it was wrong. Still, when a text suggests cruising, he goes to an isolated place by the town's lakeshore. The family is there: the girl's grandmother, mother, and uncle. They had been intercepting his messages. They tell him he is doing illegal things. He argues nothing illegal has happened yet. They tell him to stop, and he says he will. He later calls it a close call and seeks a psychologist. In writing to Håkon, he says he asked about the therapist's duty to report and was told he would have to be reported if he was an imminent danger to himself or others. Near the end, the credits and preview point to the final chapter, where the series says it learned Faulkner had been more active on the dark web than they knew.

As heard by us

A patient, unsettling chapter that turns ordinary closeness into a warning sign.

Ben Faulkner is traced through the kind of ordinary contact that makes the larger pattern harder to shrug off. Emily looks back on a college relationship that felt real enough to include parents and shared time, even if it moved in awkward, stop-start stretches; from there the…

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Why you'd press play

You hear how a college relationship and a student's messages start to close in on Ben Faulkner.

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