The Watcher is Watching You Watch the Watcher

New York Magazine’s The Cut released a tell-all article in 2018. This article includes interviews with the targeted family, neighbors, and investigators on the case. 

The Watcher House is located at 657 Boulevard in Westfield, New Jersey. According to the most recent census data, there is a total population of 30,559 in Westfield. There is an 80% owner-occupied housing unit rate and the median value of owner-occupied housing units is $890,000. Median household income is $203,235. In 2014, when The Watcher appeared, the website NeighborhoodScout named it the country’s 30th-safest town. 

The most notable crime in the town was committed by John List in 1971. He lived in Westfield with his mother, wife, and three children in a mansion with 19 rooms. John List killed his mother, wife, and three children and got away with it for 18 years. He was caught when America’s Most Wanted ran a story on the murders. 

A more fun fact about Westfield is that the town hosts the annual Addams Fest in honor of Charles Addams. The author used Westfield, specifically a Victorian house within the town, as a model for the Addams Family home when he first created the comic. 

Westfield is a wealthy, affluent area of New Jersey. One of the people interviewed for The Cut article told the publication, “The Boulevard used to be THE street to live on … You made it if you lived on the Boulevard.”

The Broaddus Family Receives Letters

Derek and Maria Broaddus thought they made it when they purchased a 6-bedroom, 4-bathroom colonial at 657 Boulevard for $1.3 million in June 2014. Maria Broaddus was raised in Westfield. Derek grew up in Maine and moved his way up the ladder to senior vice president at an insurance company in Manhattan. The Broaddus family bought 657 Boulevard just after Derek celebrated his 40th birthday. 

Derek, Maria and their three children were currently living in another area of Westfield when they closed on the house on Boulevard. But, Derek was still at the house frequently, completing renovations and making the house ready for his family. 

Derek was doing just that when he found an envelope addressed in thick, clunky handwriting to “The New Owner.” The letter read: 

Dearest new neighbor at 657 Boulevard, Allow me to welcome you to the neighborhood. How did you end up here? Did 657 Boulevard call to you with its force within? 657 Boulevard has been the subject of my family for decades now and as it approaches its 110th birthday, I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming. My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time. Do you know the history of the house? Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard? Why are you here? I will find out.

The letter identified the family’s Honda minivan as well as the workers renovating the home. The letter continued: 

I see already that you have flooded 657 Boulevard with contractors so that you can destroy the house as it was supposed to be. “Tsk, tsk, tsk … bad move. You don’t want to make 657 Boulevard unhappy.

Then the letter talked about the children:

You have children. I have seen them. So far I think there are three that I have counted. Do you need to fill the house with the young blood I requested? Better for me. Was your old house too small for the growing family? Or was it greed to bring me your children? Once I know their names I will call to them and draw them too me.

Who am I? There are hundreds and hundreds of cars that drive by 657 Boulevard each day. Maybe I am in one. Look at all the windows you can see from 657 Boulevard. Maybe I am in one. Look out any of the many windows in 657 Boulevard at all the people who stroll by each day. Maybe I am one. Welcome my friends, welcome. Let the party begin.

The letter was signed: The Watcher. 

Derek was alone when he received this first letter so he was terrified. He raced around the house and turned off every light so no one could see inside. He then called the Westfield Police Department who sent an officer to the house. The officer read the letter and said, “What the fuck is this?” then asked Derek if he had any enemies. The officer also recommended moving a piece of construction equipment just in case The Watcher tried to toss it through a window. 

So, Derek rushed back to his family and that night, Derek and Maria sent an email to John and Andrea Woods, the couple who sold them the house on Boulevard. Derek and Maria asked if they had any idea who may have written this letter. 

Andrea Woods sent an email the next morning. In this email, she admitted that the Woods Family also received a letter from The Watcher. This letter made a similar mention of The Watcher’s family observing the house over time. Andrea said this letter was “odd”, but the Woods Family had never received anything like it in their 23 years in the house. So they threw the letter away without much thought. 

The Woodses then went with Maria to the police station where they met with Detective Leonard Lugo. He told Maria not to tell anyone about the letters, including her new neighbors because everyone was now a suspect. Maria had never met most of these neighbors, so she was suspicious of everyone. 

The entire Broaddus family spent weeks on high alert. Whenever Maria took the kids to the house on Boulevard, she would yell their names if they wandered too far. 

The second letter arrived two weeks after the first one. Maria recognized the thick black lettering on a card-shaped envelope and called the police. The Watcher wrote: 

Welcome again to your new home at 657 Boulevard. The workers have been busy and I have been watching you unload carfuls of your personal belongings. The dumpster is a nice touch. Have they found what is in the walls yet? In time they will.

In this second letter, The Watcher had addressed Derek and Maria directly, but misspelled their names as “Mr. and Mrs. Braddus.” Almost like they heard the name, but didn’t see it written down. This letter also identified each child by birth order and by their nicknames. Almost like they heard Maria yell for the children. The letter asked about one child in particular. The Watcher had seen this child using an easel inside an enclosed porch. They wrote: Is she the artist in the family?

The second letter continued: 

657 Boulevard is anxious for you to move in. It has been years and years since the young blood ruled the hallways of the house. Have you found all of the secrets it holds yet? Will the young blood play in the basement? Or are they too afraid to go down there alone. I would [be] very afraid if I were them. It is far away from the rest of the house. If you were upstairs you would never hear them scream. Will they sleep in the attic? Or will you all sleep on the second floor? Who has the bedrooms facing the street? I’ll know as soon as you move in. It will help me to know who is in which bedroom. Then I can plan better. All of the windows and doors in 657 Boulevard allow me to watch you and track you as you move through the house. Who am I? I am the Watcher and have been in control of 657 Boulevard for the better part of two decades now. The Woods family turned it over to you. It was their time to move on and kindly sold it when I asked them to. I pass by many times a day. 657 Boulevard is my job, my life, my obsession. And now you are too Braddus family. Welcome to the product of your greed! Greed is what brought the past three families to 657 Boulevard and now it has brought you to me. Have a happy moving in day. You know I will be watching.

After this second letter, Derek and Maria stopped bringing their kids to the house and they questioned whether or not they wanted to move in at all. Then the third letter arrived. The Watcher wrote: 

Where have you gone to? 657 Boulevard is missing you.

The Broaddus family received the final letter when they were no longer in the house. By spring 2017, the Broaddus family rented the property out. Just two weeks after the new family moved in a fourth letter arrived. The Watcher addressed the letter, Violent winds and bitter cold, To the vile and spiteful Derek and his wench of a wife Maria: 

You wonder who The Watcher is? Turn around idiots, Maybe you even spoke to me, one of the so called neighbors who has no idea who The Watcher could be. Or maybe you do know and are too scared to tell anyone. Good move. 657 Boulevard survived your attempted assault and stood strong with its army of supporters barricading its gates... My soldiers of the Boulevard followed my orders to a T. They carried out their mission and saved the soul of 657 Boulevard with my orders. All hail The Watcher!!! Maybe a car accident. Maybe a fire. Maybe something as simple as a mild illness that never seems to go away but makes you fell sick day after day after day after day after day. Maybe the mysterious death of a pet. Loved ones suddenly die. Planes and cars and bicycles crash. Bones break. You are despised by the house... and The Watcher won.

Who is Watching & Writing? 

When the Woods family first put the house on the market, they had received multiple offers above their asking price. This made the Broaddus family believe The Watcher may be someone upset over losing the house. But, the Woodses were able to dispute this. They told the Broaddus family one interested buyer had backed out after a bad medical diagnosis, while another had already found a different home. 

It also made more sense that the letters came from a neighbor. The renovations referenced in the letters were mostly interior. When Derek and Maria walked Detective Lugo around the house, they showed him that the easel on the porch was hidden from the street by vegetation. It would be difficult to see their child using it unless someone was behind the house or right next door.

A few days after the first letter, Maria and Derek went to a barbecue on Boulevard. They hadn’t told anyone about The Watcher, as per police instructions. However, they found themselves scanning the party for clues. 

At one point, Derek was chatting with John Schmidt, who lived two doors down. Schmidt told Derek about the Langfords. Peggy Langford was in her 90s, and several of her adult children, all in their 60s, lived with her. Schmidt told Derek the family was a bit odd, but they were harmless. He described one of the sons, Michael Langford, as a “kind of a Boo Radley character.” 

Derek started to believe the case was solved. The Langford house was right next to the easel on the porch. The Langford family had lived there since the 1960s which is when The Watcher’s father started watching 657 Boulevard, according to the letters. The patriarch of the family, Richard Langford had died 12 years prior. The current Watcher claimed he was on the job for “the better part of two decades.” 

Derek and Maria told Detective Lugo about the Langford family and he told them he already suspected the family. Lugo brought Michael Langford to police headquarters for an interview a week after the first letter arrived. Michael denied knowing anything about the letters and there wasn’t any evidence against him. 

There wasn’t much hard evidence at all and after a few weeks, the police chief told Derek and Maria that there wasn’t much the department could do. They were understandably frustrated since these weird letters threatened their children. 

So, they started their own investigation. Derek became especially obsessed. He set up webcams in 657 Boulevard and spent nights crouched in the dark, watching to see if anyone was watching the house at close range. 

He showed New York Magazine, the documents relating to the case, including copies of the letters, and a map displaying when each of 657’s neighbors had moved in with overlays marking possible sight lines for the easel and a circle for “Approximate Range of ‘Ear Shot’ ” to estimate who might have heard Maria yelling their kids’ names. Only a few homes fit both criteria.

They also turned to several experts. They employed a private investigator, who staked out the neighborhood and ran background checks on the Langfords. They didn’t find anything noteworthy. Derek was on a high school board of trustees with the former FBI agent who served as the inspiration for Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs so he asked her for advice. 

They also hired Robert Lenehan, another former FBI agent, to conduct a threat assessment. He recognized several old-fashioned tics in the letters that pointed to an older writer. He didn’t think The Watcher was likely to act on the threats, but the letters had enough typos and errors to imply a certain erraticism. There was also a “seething anger” directed at the wealthy in particular.

The focus remained on the Langfords. In cooperation with Westfield police, Derek and Maria sent a letter to the Langfords announcing plans to tear down the house, hoping to prompt a response. Detective Lugo brought Michael Langford in for a second interview but got nowhere, and his sister, Abby, accused the police of harassing their family. 

Eventually, the Broadduses hired a lawyer named Lee Levitt who met with several members of the Langford family, as well as their attorney, to show them the letters, along with photos explaining how their home was one of the few vantage points from which the easel could be seen. Levitt told The Cut, the meeting grew tense and the Langfords insisted Michael was innocent.

Abby had a point because there were reasons to consider other suspects. For one thing, the police spoke to Michael before the second letter was sent, which would make sending two more letters very reckless. There was also a whole neighborhood full of suspects. The private investigator hired by the Broadduses found two child sex offenders within a few blocks, but this led nowhere. 

The Broadduses' housepainter, Bill Woodward, had also noticed something strange. The couple behind 657 Boulevard kept a pair of lawn chairs strangely close to Derek and Maria’s property. Woodward told New York Magazine that one day he was looking out the window and saw an older man sitting in one of the chairs. He wasn’t facing his house - he was facing the Broaddus household. Boulevard residents told The Cut that one of their kids had married a man who grew up in 657 Boulevard. 

But by the end of 2014, the investigation had stalled. The Watcher had left no digital trail, no fingerprints, and no way to place someone at the scene of a crime. In December 2014, the Westfield police told the Broadduses they had run out of options. To feel any type of comfort they could, Derek showed the letters to his priest who agreed to bless the house. 

The renovations to 657 Boulevard, including a new alarm system, were finished within a few months. But the Broaddus family was terrified to move in. The Broadduses had sold their old home, so they moved in with Maria’s parents while continuing to pay the mortgage and property taxes on 657 Boulevard. They told only a handful of friends about the letters. When others asked why they weren’t moving in, they explained it as “legal issues.” Many started to wonder if they were getting divorced. 

The letters from The Watcher caused Maria so much anxiety that she started seeing a therapist. This therapist diagnosed her with PTSD from the events. 

Six months after the letters arrived, the Broaddus family decided to sell 657 Boulevard. They initially listed it for more than they paid, to reflect the renovations they’d done. However, word spread quickly about why this beautiful house was sitting empty. 

One broker emailed to say her client “loved” it but that “there are so many unsubstantiated rumors flying around,” ranging “from sexual predator to stalker,” that they needed to know more. The Broadduses sent a partial disclosure mentioning the letters to interested buyers and told Coldwell Banker, their realtor, that they intended to show the full letters to anyone whose offer was accepted. 

Several preliminary bids came in well below the asking price, but the Broadduses weren’t ready to take such a financial hit and only wanted to share the letters with likely buyers. No one got that far, even after they lowered the price. 

A realtor suggested the Broaddus family withhold the letters, but Derek said, “I don’t know how you live through what we did and think you could do it to somebody else.” He wasn’t sure how the Woods family didn’t tell them about the letter they received prior to selling the house. 

On June 2, 2015, a year after buying 657 Boulevard, the Broaddus family filed a legal complaint against the Woodses, arguing that the Woodses should have disclosed the letter. The Woodses argued that they remembered the letter they received as more strange than threatening, thanking them for taking care of the house. They said they never had any issues and rarely even locked the doors. 

Derek and Maria hoped they would reach a quiet settlement with the Woodses. Their kids still didn’t know about The Watcher, and their lawyer assured them that, at most, a small legal newswire might pick up the story. 

That was not the case. A few weeks later, a local reporter found the complaint, which included snippets of The Watcher’s menacing threats, and the story went viral.

News trucks camped out at 657 Boulevard. Derek and Maria got more than 300 media requests, but with advice from a crisis-management consultant referred by one of Derek’s colleagues, they decided not to speak publicly to spare their kids even more attention. 

The Broaddus family left Westfield and went to a friend’s beach house. Eventually, Derek and Maria sat down with their children to explain the real reason they hadn’t moved into their home. The kids had plenty of questions — Who is The Watcher? Where does this person live? Why is this person angry with us? Derek and Maria had no answers. 

People were obsessed with solving the real-life mystery online. A commenter on NJ.com suggested ground-penetrating radar to find whatever The Watcher claimed was in the walls. The home inspector had already looked and told Derek the only issue was the aging home’s lack of insulation. 

A group of Reddit users obsessed over Google Maps’ Street View, which showed a car parked in front of 657 that one user thought had “a man holding a camera in the driver’s seat.” Others saw a “pixelated glare.”

The range of proposed suspects included a jilted mistress, a spurned Realtor, a local high-schooler’s creative-writing project, guerrilla marketing for a horror movie, and “mall goths having fun.”

Once the letters went public and the story went viral, the people of Westfield were on edge. Laurie Clancy teaches piano lessons in her house behind 657 Boulevard. She told The Cut one of her students came for a lesson shortly after news of The Watcher broke and started bawling. Clancy told the publication that the girl was terrified to walk down the Boulevard. 

Westfield’s Mayor Andy Skibitksy assured the town that The Watcher hadn’t been heard from in a year and that even though the police hadn’t solved the case, their investigation had been exhaustive. 

But most of 657 Boulevard’s neighbors never heard from the cops. Several neighbors wrote a letter to the local paper and expressed their concerns. They wrote, “We are confounded as to how a thorough investigation can be conducted without talking to all the neighbors with proximity to the home.”

Because of this media attention, Westfield police asked veteran detective Barron Chambliss to look into the case. He took another look at the Langfords. According to his brother Sandy Langford, Michael had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young man. He sometimes spooked newcomers to the neighborhood when he did strange things, like walking through their backyards or peeking into the windows of homes that were being renovated. 

But, everyone who knew him agreed that these odd things were mostly just unusual neighborly acts of kindness. People who had known Michael for decades told The Cut that they didn’t think he was capable of writing the letters and neither did Detective Chambliss. 

As Detective Chambliss looked into the case, he discovered something surprising: Investigators had conducted DNA analysis on one of the envelopes and determined that the DNA belonged to a woman. So, Chambliss took ANOTHER look at the Langfords. This time he looked more closely at Abby Langford, Michael’s sister, who worked as a real estate agent. She also worked at the local Lord & Taylor, and Chambliss coordinated with a security guard there to nab her plastic water bottle during a shift. However, the DNA sample was not a match. 

Derek and Maria were back to square one. They still weren’t sharing all the information with their neighbors, but they did spend an afternoon walking the block with a picture of The Watcher’s handwritten envelope. They hoped someone might recognize the writing from a Christmas card, but the only notable encounter came when an older man who lived behind 657 said his son joked that The Watcher sounded a little bit like him. 

A neighbor across the street was the CEO of the security firm Kroll, and the Broadduses hired the company to look for handwriting matches, but they found nothing. They also hired Robert Leonard, a renowned forensic linguist — and former member of the band Sha Na Na — who didn’t find any noteworthy overlap when he scoured local online forums for similarities to The Watcher’s writing. 

The case was cold. It was over a year since the letters so it was hard to find fresh leads. The initial police canvas was so bad that it had missed a significant clue: Around the same time that the Broaddus family had received their first letter, another family on the Boulevard got a similar note from The Watcher. The parents of that family had lived in their house for years and their kids were grown, so they threw the letter away just like the Woods family. 

But after the news broke, one of their children posted about it on Facebook, then deleted the post. When investigators spoke to the family, they confirmed that the letter had been similar to the one delivered to 657 Boulevard. This letter only made the case more confusing. 

There was another break in the case. Kinda. Police were staking out the house when they noticed a car stopped in front of the house long enough for the cops to grow suspicious. They traced the car to a young woman in a nearby town whose boyfriend lived on the same block as 657. The woman told police her boyfriend was into “some really dark video games,” including one in which he was playing as a specific character: “The Watcher.”

The female DNA could be explained by an accomplice such as the girlfriend. The boyfriend was living elsewhere at the time, but he agreed to come in for an interview on two separate occasions. He didn’t show up either time. Police didn’t have enough evidence to compel him to appear, and with the media attention dying down, he dropped the case and moved on.

In the spring of 2016, the Broaddus family put 657 Boulevard back on the market. They held a well-attended open house. Derek and Maria spent hours researching every person who signed in and comparing their handwriting to The Watcher’s, but each time a potential buyer expressed interest and met with the family’s lawyer to read the letters, they backed out.

The Broaddus family felt as if they were out of options, so their real-estate lawyer proposed an idea: they sell the house to a developer who would tear it down and split the property into two sellable homes. 

When this proposal was announced, Westfield’s Facebook groups lit up. Some felt bad for the Broaddus family while others thought this was all part of a long con. Some believed the Broaddus family got in over their heads and couldn’t afford the house after purchasing it. 

The Westfield town council devoted a three-hour hearing to this issue and then met again in January 2017 to make their decision. 

The board unanimously rejected the proposal and Derek and Maria were distraught. The Broadduses recognized that 657 Boulevard was a beautiful house on a beautiful street that was worth maintaining but were surprised their neighbors didn’t see the uniqueness of the situation. 

On top of the mortgage and renovations, they have paid around $100,000 in Westfield property taxes and spent at least that amount investigating The Watcher and exploring ways to deal with the home. 

But Derek and Maria received good news shortly after this rejection. A family with grown children and two big dogs had agreed to rent 657 Boulevard. The renter told the Star-Ledger he wasn’t worried about The Watcher, though he had a clause in the lease that let him out in case of another letter.

And maybe Derek and Maria shouldn’t have done that because as I mentioned earlier in the episode, the renters received the final letter. It didn’t scare them to move out though, don’t worry. 

Derek went over to 657 Boulevard to deal with a squirrel problem on the roof. The renter handed him an envelope that just arrived. The final letter read:

You wonder who The Watcher is? Turn around idiots, Maybe you even spoke to me, one of the so called neighbors who has no idea who The Watcher could be. Or maybe you do know and are too scared to tell anyone. Good move. 657 Boulevard survived your attempted assault and stood strong with its army of supporters barricading its gates... My soldiers of the Boulevard followed my orders to a T. They carried out their mission and saved the soul of 657 Boulevard with my orders. All hail The Watcher!!! Maybe a car accident. Maybe a fire. Maybe something as simple as a mild illness that never seems to go away but makes you fell sick day after day after day after day after day. Maybe the mysterious death of a pet. Loved ones suddenly die. Planes and cars and bicycles crash. Bones break. You are despised by the house... and The Watcher won.

This letter was delivered two and a half years after The Watcher appeared. It was dated February 13th, the day that Derek and Maria gave depositions in their lawsuit against the Woodses. 

Derek took the letter to police headquarters, where a detective looked at a neighborhood map and traced a circle around the house 300 yards in diameter and suggested The Watcher must be somewhere in there. 

Derek and Maria continued to press the case, but there still wasn’t much for law enforcement to go on. They sent new names to investigators whenever they found something odd, but their greatest fear was that The Watcher could be someone they’d never suspect.

The Watcher wasn’t the only one sending anonymous letters in Westfield. Years after The Watcher struck, several families received an envelope in their mailboxes. They’d been delivered by hand to the homes of people who had been the most vocal in criticizing the Broadduses online. The typed letters were signed, “Friends of the Broaddus Family.”

When The Cut asked Derek Broaddus who wrote the letters, he admitted he had.

He wasn’t proud of it and said they were the only anonymous letters he’d written. But he had felt driven to his wit’s end, fed up with watching silently as people threw accusations at his family based on practically nothing.

An Updated Article 

In October 2022, The Cut released an update on this story. In March 2019, the Broaddus family put 657 Boulevard back on the market for $999,000. Eventually, a young family in town agreed to buy it for $959,000. The Broaddus family originally paid $1.3 million, creating a loss of roughly $400,000 even before factoring in the agents’ cut as well as the $100,000 in property taxes the Broaddus family had paid and the bills for utilities, home insurance, the contractors who had begun making renovations to the home, and the lawyers and private investigators they had hired to find a solution to the mystery. A few days before closing, Derek forwarded The Cut an email confirmation of his 60th mortgage payment of $5,495.13 for a house the family had never lived in. 

Eventually, the case was turned over to the Union County Prosecutor’s Office, which started its investigation from scratch. By 2018, the office had put considerable resources into the investigation, but without fresh evidence or new leads, they stopped working on the case.

A few weeks after the original New York Magazine/The Cut article was published, the prosecutor’s office decided to try one more new idea involving the woman’s DNA on the envelope. In December 2018, the prosecutor’s office canvassed the neighborhood again; this time, it decided to ask everyone on the block to voluntarily submit DNA samples for comparison. No one appeared suspicious and none of the swabs matched the sample from the envelope. 

Derek and Maria pitched one more idea: forensic genealogy. This uses the DNA people upload to Ancestry.com and other genetic websites to identify criminal suspects through their relatives. The Golden State Killer was found this way. It’s probably the most embarrassing way a serial killer could be caught. 

The technique has been used in an increasing number of cold cases, and Derek connected with a company that was willing to take a look at the case if the prosecutor’s office would share the DNA. But the prosecutor rejected the idea, arguing that the office had never used the technology before and could not justify doing so for a family that received a few threatening letters when it had unsolved murders and rapes to deal with. Derek offered to cover the costs, but investigators said that without more evidence there is nothing they can do. 

The Cut updated article includes a new suspect. A local teacher. For 33 years, Robert Kaplow taught English at Summit High School which is two towns over from Westfield. Kaplow built a career as a writer and was best known for short comic bits he performed on NPR under the name Moe Moskowitz, of Moe Moskowitz and the Punsters. He also wrote the 2003 novel, Me and Orson Welles, which Richard Linklater adapted into a movie. The novel is filled with references to Westfield. 

Over the years, Kaplow had told a story to his students that now struck many of them as weird. The story was about a particular house in Westfield and Kaplow’s obsession with it. A former student told The Cut, “he had this idea to start writing letters to the house — not the occupants but to the house.” Another student recalled Kaplow saying that he had sent more than 50 letters to the house in question. 

There were other odd connections. Kaplow retired in 2014 and finished his final semester of teaching that June, the same month The Watcher started sending letters to the Broaddus family. While Robert had moved out of Westfield, his brother, Richard, was still there. He lived half a block from 657 Boulevard and worked as an attorney in town. In fact, when the Broadduses sued the Woods family, alleging that they should have disclosed the letter they’d received from The Watcher, the Woodses were represented by — you guessed it — Richard Kaplow.

Robert Kaplow told The Cut he was familiar with the accusation. He had read about it on Wikipedia. In 2020, a user updated Kaplow’s page with a paragraph detailing the evidence. An editing war ensued. The insinuation was removed as defamatory, then reinserted and deleted and reinserted several more times. 

Kaplow admitted that he had written letters to a house in Westfield, as his students recalled. But the house wasn’t 657 Boulevard. He said it was a Victorian on the north side of town and the letters were admiring, not threatening. He eventually befriended the family who lived there; they even let him housesit once.

Most investigators who have looked at the case agree on a few things: The Watcher most likely lived near 657 Boulevard, and they were probably an older person. 

In 2020, the Broadduses asked the prosecutor to close the case and return the letters and DNA evidence to them, so that they could hand it over to the forensic genealogists themselves. The office declined to do so. 

Derek spoke with The Cut again during the update article. He admits to having had a difficult time getting beyond his obsession with the case and what it did to their lives. “I had just turned 40 when we bought the house,” he joked to The Cut “I am now 93 years old.” 

The Broaddus family tries to avoid thinking or talking about The Watcher since it only adds stress. They prefer to move on and have turned down offers to go on just about every television network and declined interest from documentarians hoping to try and solve the case, not wanting to put their lives on camera.

Pretty much everyone The Cut spoke to in Westfield believes the Broadduses made a killing by giving Netflix the rights to adapt their story. One neighbor told The Cut she’d heard that the family pocketed close to $10 million. In reality, the money from Netflix didn’t even cover their losses on the house.

Ryan Murphy Got the Rights & Made It Wrong

Speaking of the Netflix deal, let’s talk about how Ryan Murphy got the rights and made it wrong and weird. He’s Ryan Murphy. It’s what he does. 

I will be honest I’ve only watched a few episodes of The Watcher series when it first came out, but I can still quickly go over who inspired certain characters. 

First off, Derek and Maria specifically asked show producers to make their on-screen counterparts as different as possible. Their characters were named Dean and Nora Brannock, so not that different.

In the show, Mitch played by Richard Kind, and Mo played by character actress Margo Martindale were inspired by real-life neighbors. There’s a joke in this article about the blood-drinking cult allegations and homicidal son being pure fiction. I didn’t get to that part of the show. These neighbors were inspired by the real-life neighbors who kept their chairs facing 657 Boulevard instead of their own home. 

Michael Langford and Abby Langford loosely inspired Jasper played by Terry Kinney and Pearl played by Mia Farrow. The suspected English teacher Robert Kaplow inspired the character Roger Kaplan played by Michael Nouri. 

In the show, the family’s teenage security expert Dakota played by Henry Hunter Hall is under suspicion when it’s discovered his gaming tag is “The Watcher.” While the Broaddus family didn’t have a teenage security expert, investigators did talk with a woman whose boyfriend was a gamer and played under the name The Watcher. Like I said before, this man never showed up for police interviews so there was not much to go on. 

The show also includes a character named John Graff played by Joe Mantello. His character was inspired by John List, the man who murdered his family in Westfield in 1971. John List had nothing to do with The Watcher events and passed away before the Woods family even thought about selling 657 Boulevard. Ryan Murphy just loves to bring in some serial killers. 

That’s All She Watched 

So, the mystery of The Watcher remains unsolved. Many people believe the Broaddus family did it for attention, but I would argue that the family was terrified. Maria was diagnosed with PTSD from the event and their children were teased and talked about by most people in town. I just truly don’t believe it would be worth it.

Unfortunately, unless there is a confession, we will never really know who was watching 657 Boulevard.