Post by hi224 on Oct 3, 2019 3:17:57 GMT
So The internet is oftentimes where urban legends, mysteries, and hoaxes originate. The infamous "Ruth call" is one such mystery that has had its validity debated.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3j_xlj9K08 (the call) warning: it is EXTREMELY disturbing. not much rattles me, but this makes my blood run cold. Also, be careful of the volume, it gets very loud at the end. The video is subtitled so if you don't want to listen to it, you can turn the volume down and read along.
medium.com/@catacombsofcrime/ruth-price-911-call-fact-or-fiction-an-examination-of-the-evidence-b0045fba7ed1 (article about the call)
I'll summarize both the call and the article that reviews the evidence, as well as put my thoughts below:
In the call, an elderly woman identifies herself as a "Ruth [last name censored]" but it is widely believed her last name was Price, Dugas, or both. She tries to give her location, but the operator cuts her off and asks what the problem is. Ruth expresses concerns about a suspicious man lurking around her apartment. The operator asks where the man currently is, and Ruth says she doesn't know. There's a kind of THUD sound that's hard to hear, then it sounds like something hits the receiver, and Ruth starts screaming. She screams for help, saying she can't breathe, followed by gagging sounds. The operator doesn't say anything during this. The video then cuts off. I assume that's the end of the call, though.
So was she a real person? Is this an actual 911 call?
Evidence
Supporting "hoax" theory:
- There has been no known news articles of this event, which some find suspicious.
- The operator's handling is absolutely abysmal. She cuts Ruth off when Ruth is trying to give her location. The operator doesn't ask the right questions, she doesn't try to get the location, and she doesn't say/do anything while Ruth is presumably being murdered.
- it's illegal to release 911 audio that depicts someone dying
- if she dropped the phone (which we assume based on the sound of something hitting the receiver), why is her voice still so clear and sounds like its close to the phone?
Supporting "legitimate" theory:
- The oldest mention of this call that can be found online is that of an obscure forum post from 2002 by a former 911 operator that says this call was shown to them during training as an example of what not to do. The same call is mentioned years later by a user on reddit, with the same story: used for dispatcher training. Said reddit user claims that Ruth's last name was Price. Not mentioned in the article, but I personally have seen multiple different users on different subs at different times with similar stories. I find it hard to believe that two people would come up with the same story years apart, or that the redditor somehow saw this post on an obscure police forum website, unless the OP of both posts was the same person.
- There is a Ruth Price found on find-a-grave, whos birth and death dates roughly match the timeline of when she would have been born and died. The grave says she was born in 1908 and died in 1985 (more on the death date later). Assuming this is the same woman, she would have been about 80 years old at the time, give or take. The Ruth in the call states that she's an old woman that lives alone. The grave also has the name of a man who was born in 1905 and died in 1951. Could this be Ruth's husband?
- Her speech pattern seems very natural and unscripted. She sometimes starts a sentence and then starts it over again when she realizes that's not the word she wanted to use. like she says "So I went-- So I live alone", as if she's trying to decide on if she's going to talk about what happened or her current situation, ultimately deciding on the latter.
- the thud that can be heard before she screams could be the sound of a door opening/closing, presumably the killer entering the room. That seems like a detail that a hoaxer would most likely overlook
- it just. Sounds real. That sounds like real, genuine terror
Counterpoints to the "hoax" theory
- There are no articles on the incident, but that's not really weird because, if we take what the forum user and reddit posters have said, this call took place sometime in the 1980s, and it began being used for training in the early 1990s. It's never revealed where this took place. The likelihood of finding a 30 to 40 year old newspaper article in an unknown town/city is pretty slim. Using the grave, someone could probably look for newspapers in 1985 in Polk County, Missouri. But that's still making a pretty big assumption that the Ruth from the grave is the same Ruth.
- Again, this was supposedly the 1980s, operators probably weren't as well trained as they are now. Even now there are operators that have horrendous handling of calls. Off the top of my head I can think of the one where the operator hung up on a teenage girl while her friend (it might have been her father? I don't remember) was dying because she "was rude" and "kept swearing", and the one where the operator told a drowning woman to "shut up". People can be shitty at their jobs, and this is supposedly used as a bad example.
- while it is illegal to release 911 audio that depicts a person dying, if this is used as training (especially if its across the country), then it wouldn't be impossible for someone to get their hands on the audio and post it for whatever reason. Leaks happen.
- She says she can't breathe in the call after she presumably drops the phone. Again, in the 1980s most phones had cords. The killer could have strangled her with the phone cord, which is why her voice sounded so close despite having dropped the phone.
I personally think this is real. It doesn't have elements of something staged or scripted. Those screams chilled me to the bone. This, and the transcripts of the toybox killer's videos have been the only things that shook me to my core. I know the evidence isn't very solid, but it just sounds so real.
It's worth noting that this is not the case of the murder of Ruth Pelke, who was a 78 year old woman stabbed to death in her home in 1985 by a local teenager who then stole $10 and Ruth's car.
What are your thoughts? This is my first ever write-up/summary, so let me know if I made any mistakes or did something wrong please
www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3j_xlj9K08 (the call) warning: it is EXTREMELY disturbing. not much rattles me, but this makes my blood run cold. Also, be careful of the volume, it gets very loud at the end. The video is subtitled so if you don't want to listen to it, you can turn the volume down and read along.
medium.com/@catacombsofcrime/ruth-price-911-call-fact-or-fiction-an-examination-of-the-evidence-b0045fba7ed1 (article about the call)
I'll summarize both the call and the article that reviews the evidence, as well as put my thoughts below:
In the call, an elderly woman identifies herself as a "Ruth [last name censored]" but it is widely believed her last name was Price, Dugas, or both. She tries to give her location, but the operator cuts her off and asks what the problem is. Ruth expresses concerns about a suspicious man lurking around her apartment. The operator asks where the man currently is, and Ruth says she doesn't know. There's a kind of THUD sound that's hard to hear, then it sounds like something hits the receiver, and Ruth starts screaming. She screams for help, saying she can't breathe, followed by gagging sounds. The operator doesn't say anything during this. The video then cuts off. I assume that's the end of the call, though.
So was she a real person? Is this an actual 911 call?
Evidence
Supporting "hoax" theory:
- There has been no known news articles of this event, which some find suspicious.
- The operator's handling is absolutely abysmal. She cuts Ruth off when Ruth is trying to give her location. The operator doesn't ask the right questions, she doesn't try to get the location, and she doesn't say/do anything while Ruth is presumably being murdered.
- it's illegal to release 911 audio that depicts someone dying
- if she dropped the phone (which we assume based on the sound of something hitting the receiver), why is her voice still so clear and sounds like its close to the phone?
Supporting "legitimate" theory:
- The oldest mention of this call that can be found online is that of an obscure forum post from 2002 by a former 911 operator that says this call was shown to them during training as an example of what not to do. The same call is mentioned years later by a user on reddit, with the same story: used for dispatcher training. Said reddit user claims that Ruth's last name was Price. Not mentioned in the article, but I personally have seen multiple different users on different subs at different times with similar stories. I find it hard to believe that two people would come up with the same story years apart, or that the redditor somehow saw this post on an obscure police forum website, unless the OP of both posts was the same person.
- There is a Ruth Price found on find-a-grave, whos birth and death dates roughly match the timeline of when she would have been born and died. The grave says she was born in 1908 and died in 1985 (more on the death date later). Assuming this is the same woman, she would have been about 80 years old at the time, give or take. The Ruth in the call states that she's an old woman that lives alone. The grave also has the name of a man who was born in 1905 and died in 1951. Could this be Ruth's husband?
- Her speech pattern seems very natural and unscripted. She sometimes starts a sentence and then starts it over again when she realizes that's not the word she wanted to use. like she says "So I went-- So I live alone", as if she's trying to decide on if she's going to talk about what happened or her current situation, ultimately deciding on the latter.
- the thud that can be heard before she screams could be the sound of a door opening/closing, presumably the killer entering the room. That seems like a detail that a hoaxer would most likely overlook
- it just. Sounds real. That sounds like real, genuine terror
Counterpoints to the "hoax" theory
- There are no articles on the incident, but that's not really weird because, if we take what the forum user and reddit posters have said, this call took place sometime in the 1980s, and it began being used for training in the early 1990s. It's never revealed where this took place. The likelihood of finding a 30 to 40 year old newspaper article in an unknown town/city is pretty slim. Using the grave, someone could probably look for newspapers in 1985 in Polk County, Missouri. But that's still making a pretty big assumption that the Ruth from the grave is the same Ruth.
- Again, this was supposedly the 1980s, operators probably weren't as well trained as they are now. Even now there are operators that have horrendous handling of calls. Off the top of my head I can think of the one where the operator hung up on a teenage girl while her friend (it might have been her father? I don't remember) was dying because she "was rude" and "kept swearing", and the one where the operator told a drowning woman to "shut up". People can be shitty at their jobs, and this is supposedly used as a bad example.
- while it is illegal to release 911 audio that depicts a person dying, if this is used as training (especially if its across the country), then it wouldn't be impossible for someone to get their hands on the audio and post it for whatever reason. Leaks happen.
- She says she can't breathe in the call after she presumably drops the phone. Again, in the 1980s most phones had cords. The killer could have strangled her with the phone cord, which is why her voice sounded so close despite having dropped the phone.
I personally think this is real. It doesn't have elements of something staged or scripted. Those screams chilled me to the bone. This, and the transcripts of the toybox killer's videos have been the only things that shook me to my core. I know the evidence isn't very solid, but it just sounds so real.
It's worth noting that this is not the case of the murder of Ruth Pelke, who was a 78 year old woman stabbed to death in her home in 1985 by a local teenager who then stole $10 and Ruth's car.
What are your thoughts? This is my first ever write-up/summary, so let me know if I made any mistakes or did something wrong please
