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  Is ‘man’ even the right way to describe Zach Crystal?

  I once said that I wasn’t scared anymore, that on this podcast I’d meet monsters face to face and eye to eye. When you take the paths I take with Six Stories, monsters are what you should expect to meet.

  The person we’re going to hear from in this, our first episode of this series, has many supporters, both here in the UK and internationally. He also has his critics, his haters. ‘Haters’ is perhaps too mild a term.

  Ian Julius is an interesting figure. He went from folk hero to figure of hate within the space of a week. Trial by media. Trial by social media. Trial by spin. Search #Freejuli on Twitter and you’ll see what I mean.

  Also, #killjuli if you want to see some of the darker sides of social media.

  That’s if you’ve been living in a cave and have no idea what I’m talking about.

  —It’s about fifty-fifty, the messages, the letters. People who support me and people who hate me. There’s one – a proper fan, like, mental, if you know what I mean? Tattoo of his face, his signature, everything, on his chest. Wherever I go, this fucker manages to find me, doxxes me and it all starts up again.

  I read all of them, you know. All the threats from the fans, telling me what they want to do to me. It’s funny really. It’s laughable. Then I get messages from some saying they want to shake my hand, you know? They say ‘well done mate’. They know I did the right thing.

  Then someone sends me a dried-up dead rat in a box. Swings and roundabouts, innit?

  Ian Julius chases monsters. Or at least he did. Ian and his girlfriend used to call themselves the Monster-Busters. Their YouTube channel had more than fifty thousand subscribers. Good Morning Britain interviewed them at the peak of their internet fame.

  I’m speaking to Ian via Zoom. I don’t even know where he is and I don’t ask. He appears against a plain-white background.

  Monster-Busters was a simple concept – Ian, with assistance from his girlfriend, created fake profiles on social-media sites such as Boopy and Gabble, posing as twelve- or thirteen-year-old girls. That’s where they waited, ensnaring much older men who would send them inappropriate messages and photographs, and try to arrange to meet them for sex. The two would turn up at the meeting point, which would be in a public area – usually a train station – and confront the predator, before informing the police. The concept is not an original one; groups like Dark Justice and Guardians of the North do similar. Monster-Busters are no more, however, and their remaining videos have been swarmed with negative comments and downvotes by Zach Crystal fans.

  —We must have busted over a hundred paedophiles; most of them got convictions too. We worked with the police, you know? We were good at what we did. Some of the stuff we had to read, it turned your stomach. I’ll never forget it. And blokes in their seventies turning up with bags of booze and condoms to meet a thirteen-year-old girl. Scum.

  Ian and his girlfriend became heroes of sorts, at least online, even before they appeared on the mainstream media. Their reputation spread from their undisclosed location in the UK as far as 60 Minutes Australia, along with countless guest appearances on LBC Radio, BBC Radio 2 and Sky News. In each interview Ian conducted himself calmly and sensibly, never raising his voice or allowing presenters to antagonise him. There was a rash of copy-cat hunter groups online in the wake of Monster-Busters – not all of whom conducted themselves as professionally as Ian.

  —We were always as professional as we could be when we did a sting. We never screamed and shouted when we caught one, or grabbed them and knocked them about, but my God, I would have liked to sometimes. We were always transparent with the police too, always handed everything over and backed off when they asked us to.

  Countless police spokespersons attempted to dissuade the Monster-Busters from their activities – attempting to explain that what they were doing could potentially damage the cases against the predators they were trying to catch. This reasoning was met with derision from Ian’s supporters and the general public. And the figures do not lie. Due to the Monster-Busters group, a significant amount of online predators were handed over to the police. It’s an undeniable fact that the police would not have been able to convict them without the help of Ian and his team.

  —Everyone knew it. Everyone knew I was in the right, that we were doing the right thing. All of them: the police, the government. I was just some bloke in his living room; I didn’t have a degree or training, but I knew how to get them, I knew how to catch monsters. But then it all fell to bits didn’t it?

  Now, Ian’s location changes every few months; every time he’s doxxed online, every time his windows are broken or something unpleasant is pushed through his letterbox. Ian won’t tell me the whereabouts of his girlfriend. Or even if they’re still together. What we do know is that the Monster-Busters online paedophile-hunting duo has disbanded.

  —It took slightly longer to catch this one than usual, that’s for sure. This one was a slow burner. There’s a lot of them out there who’ll start with the dirty stuff almost immediately. They’re the common sort and they’re easy to catch. They spend all day trawling those sites for young girls, hundreds of thousands of dick-pics at the ready. Desperate, older men.

  This one was in it for the long game, though, and we knew from experience that ones like him are the worst. They’re the ones with a bit of brains. They’re the charmers; they’ve got the chat. They’re drip-drip, insidious predators – they get under the skin and burrow deeper. When we started talking to him, that became clear very quickly.

  —How were you able to tell that so fast?

  —So, when you’re talking to these people, you have to realise something. These guys are full of lies. Everything they say is a lie. Every single line they write is a seduction – it’s telling someone what they think they want to hear. The end game is total control.

  —But later, you noticed something amiss. Something else, right?

  —A few things stood out. We’d been messaging with him, back and forth, for about a month. It was intense – constant, long-winded, deep conversations. It became apparent he was very isolated, very lonely. Most of them are, but the amount of messages we were getting from him was … it was odd. That was the first thing. The second was when he began to let things slip.

  —Like what?

  —Like where he was. That was a big one. They usually tell us where they live early on, angling for a meet-up, you know? He didn’t. He was very cagey about where he was, until he said something about a … ghost … or something.

  —A ghost?

  —Yeah … he seemed to be alluding to something very specific. He said that where he was, was ‘haunted’ by some kind of spirit, some animal.

  —That’s rather niche, isn’t it?

  —It is – when people talk about ghosts they mean humans, don’t they? Not him. He was going on about it for ages, describing it, this great rotten stag, its blackened flesh all hanging off it, its horns all tangled together on top of its head, which was a skull. Glowing red eyes. He said it was like the Mothman – it only showed up when something terrible was going to happen. I believe he was trying to scare us – trying to scare who he thought was a vulnerable young girl. Sicko. He kept asking if we were brave enough to try and find it with him, to face it. It was like a challenge. Only the ‘special girls’ were brave enough he said. His story rang a bell – I’d heard of it before. That’s when I thought he wasn’t just anyone, you know?

  — There must have been more though – more clues that he was who you claimed he was.

  —The thing was, we never thought it could really be Crystal. The actual Zach Crystal. It was him who convinced us in the end. When we accidentally said his name.

  There you have it. That was their claim. There came a point in the conversation when Ian and his girlfriend claim to have been utterly convinced that they had ensnared Zach Crystal himself.

  Zach Crystal, who had slipped off the face of the earth for n
early a year, and at that point – April 2019, according to Ian – was yet to reappear.

  —We’d been talking to the guy for a few weeks. He was telling us about his life; he was slipping in little things – how he’d grown up, this poor, lonely boy who had to work all hours. Anyone could have done it really – impersonated him online – if they had enough knowledge. But the thing was … he was so out of touch with reality. Not in an insane way, but in a way that shows you someone who’s not lived a normal life. That’s when we began to turn it around, when we started to ask our own questions. We wanted to be subtle – we didn’t want to scare him off. We started small, like he had started with us and as the time went by, it started to become more and more obvious.

  —What was the turning point? What was the one thing that made you realise – the moment when you were certain.

  —There were a few big pointers. He talked about how his parents were dead, how his best friend had died, how he felt anyone who got close to him, something bad happened to them. I mean these were all big things, but not quite enough. The moment we realised for sure was when we accidentally used his name, as I said before.

  —Really?

  —Yeah, it was me that did it. Just typed it in a reply. My missus looked at me, white as a sheet. My heart just sort of sank. I thought I’d wrecked it, spoiled the whole thing. I’d typed in what we were both thinking. But the thing was, he didn’t notice. He let it go. And that’s when we knew.

  We’d found him.

  Us, sat in our living room, catching paedophiles online. We’d caught someone who should have been put in prison a long time ago. But, you know, the weirdest thing about it all was that back in the day, I loved him too. Just like you did, just like everyone did.

  Like a great deal of you listening, I first became aware of Zach Crystal after his debut solo, TV performance on The Word, in 1995.

  It’s become iconic, that performance of ‘Burning Eyes’. For many, many Zach Crystal fans, that moment was a communion of sorts.

  For anyone who is young and not English, The Word was a controversial late-night television magazine show on Channel 4 in the mid-1990s. The show was hosted by radio presenter Terry Christian and comedian Mark Lamarr. It boasted the notorious television débuts of Nirvana in 1991 and Oasis in 1994. Ask anyone of a certain age if they saw nineteen-year-old Zach Crystal’s performance following a rendition of ‘Delicious’ by pop duo Shampoo, and they’ll tell you they did. About half of them will be telling the truth. Zach Crystal was, to be fair, a surprise guest on the show. I was aware of him, as were most of you, as a smarmy-looking, precocious Christian-pop brat. Think the early days of Justin Beiber, but nowhere near as famous. Zach Crystal was looked upon with scorn by most. He and his sister Naomi were known as The Crystal Twins and were popular with the elderly and on Christian music stations.

  So when Mark Lamarr announced Zach Crystal onstage, with a single raised eyebrow, that said it all.

  Zach Crystal had no edge. He was that kid with the piano wasn’t he? A Crystal twin?

  But Zach Crystal had changed.

  Zach Crystal had grown up.

  Zach Crystal had become something beyond – he had become a force.

  Zach Crystal had reinvented himself.

  And what a reinvention it was.

  Extract from I Loved the Nineties (Resonance Productions, 2010): Talking head – Danny Zade, presenter, BBC Radio 1

  —And Zach Crystal of course … I mean, he came onstage on The Word and it was like, whoa! The guy had grown about ten feet and he looked like … a man. This goofy little kid we all knew and loved … well, I say loved but we tolerated him, didn’t we?

  But now … now he was back and he was just … I mean it was before he got weird, wasn’t it? He was just amazing.

  [‘Burning Eyes’ plays in the background]

  He was like … it was like he’d been abducted by aliens, who’d reinvented him and plonked him back down on earth.

  [Sings] Ooh, burning eyes! Get out of my head…

  I mean, it became an instant anthem. Who’d have thought it? Little Zach Crystal? The thing was everyone loved it. All the indie kids and the metalheads and your teeny-boppers. Man, even your nan. It was amazing. That song never left rotation, never. Not since it was released. The guy was a multi-millionaire on that song alone.

  I was one of those people, blown away by that performance. So were many of you. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what it was about Zach Crystal that seemed to appeal to everyone.

  There was a humility to him. I remember liking that. But also mixed with an other-worldliness. Like Danny Zade says, Zach was from another planet.

  Zach Crystal was around six feet tall, ‘unexpectedly tall’ as many described him. He was rake thin and dressed in greens and browns – forest colours – with a crown of what looked like gold antlers atop his head.

  Crystal’s long, blond hair spilled over his shoulders. It should have been ridiculous, but Crystal looked elegant and mysterious at the same time. He was a stark contrast to the anoraks of the indie scene and the torn, matted clothes of the grunge musicians. Crystal wasn’t like anything anyone had ever seen before.

  It wasn’t just the costume. It was his voice – it was the way he poured his soul, his heart into playing that piano decorated with branches and leaves. He was a lone, elfin bard from some mystical forest, his call some siren song – a style that no one had heard before. In part, the wail of Björk mixed with the melancholy of Sigur Rós, backed by an astonishingly melodic pop hook.

  It shouldn’t have worked, none of it. It was showmanship, it was extravagance, but it was something else too, it called to somewhere deep inside, some childhood place where magic was still real. It was an antidote to the austerity of modern music.

  And we fell in love with it.

  And him.

  All of us.

  Even Ian Julius.

  —I was a bit older when he was on The Word that time. I was in my twenties, but I remember it, yeah. I think I was looking more at the girls he had with him. That’s irony, innit? I’ll admit it, though. I thought he was class. Just like everyone else.

  Zach Crystal was accompanied by dancers onstage. Four of them. Female. They were all thin, pale, other-worldly. They too were donned in elegant forest-coloured attire, with glass-like tiaras and smaller antlers, plus long silk cloaks.

  —They all looked like witches or something, didn’t they? Like something that had climbed out of a storybook. All dancing. It was a bit weird. I think that’s why it worked. It wasn’t daft. It should have looked daft but it wasn’t. It … I dunno, it looked good and it sounded good too.

  This performance of ‘Burning Eyes’ began my and the world’s obsession with Zach Crystal. From then on, Crystal was a superstar. More than that, he became a global megastar. His subsequent album, Yearn, spent twenty weeks on the Billboard 200 in the States and went triple platinum. The video for ‘Burning Eyes’ debuted on Top of the Pops in the UK in April and remained number one on the singles chart until it was usurped by ‘Northward Bound’, Crystal’s Christmas single.

  These were the early days of Zach Crystal, the ones I remember fondly. These were the days when many children’s parents slaved away over a sewing machine to try and replicate those clothes, those cloaks.

  Let’s go back to Ian.

  —And you actually managed to arrange a meet-up?

  —That was it. That was the moment we’d been building up to all that time. I’ll tell you now, we were scared, we were nervous. If it really was him then this wasn’t going to be any old meet with a perv. This was … I mean, if we were right, this would be huge. It was going to be the end of the biggest superstar in the world. We were going to bring him down. Our lives would change. Which they did, I suppose, just not in the way we’d suspected.

  As you heard at the beginning of this episode, Zach Crystal’s disappearance in March 2018 coincided with the discovery of remains in the vast forest that surrounded
the five hundred acres of what became known as Crystal Forest, Zach Crystal’s remote hideaway property in the Scottish Highlands. The star had become something of a recluse since the death of his parents in 2009 and he hadn’t released an album since Damage in 2007. Bizarre rumours always surrounded Crystal, largely because he rarely spoke to the media. Zach Crystal was truly an enigma. His communication came through his music and through carefully controlled messages to his fans. There would be promotional photographs released by Crystal’s publicist – shots of Crystal in his tree house, hair hanging half over his face, surrounded by twinkling fairy lights and branches, printed with Crystal’s bizarre messages of affection for his fans. To many these just seemed strange and aloof – a middle-aged man pontificating about magical powers and supernatural entities.

  As the months went by and Crystal was not found, it began to seem like he really had gone for good. There were occasional sightings reported all over the world, but nothing concrete.

  The official line was that Crystal had been hit hard by the death of his aide and friend, James Cryer. Cryer’s body was found by Crystal’s sister Naomi on Crystal’s estate, deep in the thick aspen forest of Colliecrith, where it looked like he had taken a fall down a small gulley, hitting his head on an outcrop of rock.

  This was not the first time that remains had been found on the property. In the same year that Damage was released, police were alerted to the discovery of the bodies of two fifteen-year-old girls, who had been reported missing and were said to be ardent fans of the star. Lulu Copeland and Jessica Morton were found by Crystal’s own security team in a cave close to the perimeter of his land. It’s assumed that they had been trying to reach the home of the star and died of exposure in the brutal weather. However, horrific rumours abound about what actually happened to the two girls while they were in or near Crystal Forest. There are even those who say that Crystal’s security team contaminated the scene and removed a mobile phone, which has never been recovered. Video footage supposedly from that very phone was subsequently leaked online. Like everything Zach Crystal, there are stories, claims and counter-claims about the deaths of these two young people, making the truth very difficult to come by. However, the case of Lulu and Jessica is never far from any mention of Crystal.