Shadowing Practice: They kept seeing a dead woman - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Today, I'm going to share three stories that really just sound made up, like just completely fictional, totally insane.
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But they're not.
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In fact, they all were reported in reputable media outlets around the world.
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But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right place because that's all we do, and we upload two, three,
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even four times every week.
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So if that's of interest to you, go ahead and start a friendly pillow fight with the like button, but don't tell them you've secretly filled your pillow with quarters.
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Also please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads.
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Okay, let's get into today's stories.
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On the afternoon of August 15, 2022, a 24-year-old beauty influencer
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and blogger named Cherubon K put on her makeup in front of a mirror in her bedroom in Munich, Germany.
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But this was actually Cherubon's childhood bedroom.
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She was in the home she grew up in.
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And looking around, I mean, it looked basically exactly the way it had when she was a teenager, when she last lived here.
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There were still pictures of her with her high school friends taped to the walls, and there were brightly colored pillows and furniture, like it was a time capsule of when she was in high school.
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But now, you know, she's 24 years old.
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But the reason she was back here
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and living in this bedroom all over again is because just Just a few months ago, she had separated from her husband and had to move back in with her parents.
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And while her parents did accept her home, they were not exactly happy to have her here.
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So Sharabon's family belonged to a small ethnic religion called Yezidism.
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And one of the rules of this religion was that you absolutely cannot get divorced.
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And so this was a problem for Sharabon
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because things were not going well for her in her marriage and she really wanted out.
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But both her parents and her husband's family refused to allow a divorce, and so she had just left.
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But in many ways, that had not solved the problem, because basically everybody involved here was totally furious about the separation.
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I mean, Charabon's own parents, they had agreed to take Charabon back home,
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but it was on the condition that she would only be here until she and her husband fixed things.
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Because they had to, because they couldn't get divorced.
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And Cherubon had no intention of ever going back with her husband.
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Really no matter the pressure anybody applied, it was not going to happen.
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And this was primarily because Cherubon actually had a secret.
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And that was, a few weeks ago, she had met someone new.
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A young man named Shakir.
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And so when Cherubon was out at work, at least that's what she told her parents, in reality, she was actually just visiting with Shakir.
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And even though Cherubon understood that her romance with Shakir was not only sort of forbidden,
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but also brand new, she still felt like there was something very real between them that was worth holding onto.
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In fact, their relationship was so good in their own eyes
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that the two of them had been working really hard on this plan
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that was going to get Cherubon out of her current predicament and away from her own family, and critically, away from her husband and his family.
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It was going to get her out of this marriage.
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Now Sharabon's phone buzzed on her makeup table.
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So she put down her mascara, she picked up her phone, and saw she had a notification from her Instagram account.
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So she opened the phone up, opened up Instagram, and saw she had a direct message from the person she was currently getting all made up for,
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who she planned on meeting that night.
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And meeting this person was actually the first step in Sharabon and Shakir's plan.
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So Cherubon felt her nerves buzzing as she read the DM with excitement.
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And then afterwards, she finished putting on her makeup, she brushed her long black hair, and then she grabbed her purse.
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And then she headed out into the living room
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and she told her parents who were out there that she was heading out.
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She was going to Ingolstadt, a city about an hour away, and that she'd be back in maybe a few hours.
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And so her parents are like, great, we'll see you then.
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And so Cherubon, she smiled, she walked out the door, she climbed into her Mercedes, and she drove off.
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But Cherubon, that night, didn't come back.
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A few hours after she left her house, her mom began texting her, asking where she was.
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But Cherubon didn't answer.
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So eventually her mom began calling her, but her phone just rang and went straight to voicemail and she didn't call back.
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And by about 11pm that night, when still Cherubon had not come home and nobody had seen or heard from her, Cherubon's mom was getting really worried.
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So the city where Cherubon had said she was going to, Ingolstadt, was actually where her husband lived.
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And so Cherubon's parents had actually been secretly kind of excited
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that maybe they were patching things up tonight and they might be getting back together soon.
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But for Cherubon to just disappear like this late at night
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and tell nobody was just so out of character that Cherubon's mom now couldn't help but think, like, well, what if Cherubon and her husband did see each other?
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And what if they got into a big fight?
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Like, what if something bad happened? didn't know.
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And so for her mom, she just couldn't stand to just wait around and hope her daughter turned up or hope her daughter got in touch.
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And so instead, she told her husband to grab the car keys because they were going to Ingolstadt to find their daughter.
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By about midnight, Cherubon's mother and father were in the car, Cherubon's dad was driving, and they were speeding through Ingolstadt.
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They were getting close to Cherubon's husband's flat, and their plan was to go knock on his door, didn't matter how late it was,
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and just see if Cherubon was in there or if the husband knew where she was, just anything to help them find their daughter.
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However, as they turned onto a quiet street that ran alongside a river, the mom suddenly yelled out to her husband, stop the car, stop.
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And so the dad, he hits the brakes, he pulls over and stops, and the mom leaps out and she's pointing at something and it's their daughter's car.
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It was parked right off the road, the Mercedes, right near the bank of this river.
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And so as the mom is running up to the car, she's telling herself that like, here's the explanation.
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My daughter must have just had car troubles.
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That's why she's delayed.
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That's why she hasn't been in touch.
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Like, here it is.
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Like, no big deal.
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She's going to be in here.
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Everything's going to be fine.
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But she runs up to the driver's side of that car and she looks in and at first she doesn't see anything.
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There's nobody in the front two seats of the car.
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It looks like no one's in there." But then she looks into the back seat of the car, and she sees Charabon.
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And she clearly is dead.
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Just minutes later, this street was absolutely crawling with police officers and emergency vehicles.
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And not long after that, Charabon's parents, who were standing not far from their daughter's car,
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had to watch as police officers pried open the locked back door of their daughter's car.
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And then they reached in, and they pulled out Charabon's lifeless body and she was covered in blood, and her body was also showing signs of rigor mortis.
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So it was sort of stiff, and to the parents, it was just horrible.
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The discovery of Cherubon's body immediately launched a full-scale police investigation.
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The city of Ingolstadt was relatively small, with a population of just about 80,000 people, and most years, there actually were no murders there at all.
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So this was like a really big deal.
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When the homicide detectives showed up on the scene, right away, just from looking at the body,
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They could tell that whoever killed Cherubon had done so in sort of like a wild frenzy,
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because Cherubon had been stabbed more than 50 times in the torso and the face.
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And so to detectives, this kind of overkill suggested that whoever killed Cherubon
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had to have had some really personal reason to go after her.
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And it didn't take the lead detectives very long to learn from Cherubon's very distraught parents that Cherubon's marriage was in trouble,
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and her estranged husband actually lived nearby, and they believed, the parents, that perhaps Cherubon had come here to Ingolstadt to visit with him.
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And so he lives nearby, they're in the process of potentially getting divorce, and so the detectives are thinking, seems an awful lot like the husband could be involved here.
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Within a couple of hours, Cherubon's body had been shipped off to the medical examiner for an official autopsy.
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And at the same time, the lead detective on the case had gone to Cherubon's estranged husband's home
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and hauled him down to the police station to be interviewed.
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Now, the detective had figured this would be a pretty open and shut case.
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He fully expected the husband to have visible injuries on him
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and to be acting very wired and nervous because he's the one who must have killed Cherubon.
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However, when the detective actually met the husband, the husband turned out to be a very weak suspect.
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He had cooperated immediately and fully with investigators and even offered to let them search his home and take his DNA.
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And he had an alibi for most of the evening before he'd gone to bed.
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And even though technically he didn't have anyone who could vouch for him while he had been sleeping, at least according to him,
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the detective doubted that just based on time he would have been able to get up, leave his place, go kill her, dispose of the the body, clean up, and then get back home again.
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It just didn't seem possible.
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As for Charabon's own family, beyond the husband, they really had no other idea about who might have wanted to hurt her.
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To their knowledge, Charabon didn't have any other romantic partners other than her estranged husband, and she didn't socialize much outside of work.
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They said that really the only place where she met new people was on social media, because she was a beauty influencer,
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and she posted photos and videos and gave advice on fashion.
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So, eight hours after Cherubon's body was discovered, so this is the morning of August 16th,
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the lead detective put out a release to the media asking for help from the public to identify suspects.
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And then he started digging into Cherubon's social media accounts.
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Just 24 hours later, on the morning of August 17th, 2022, so now just a day and a half after Cherubon was found dead inside of her car, Her murder was solved.
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But the people involved in this murder truly shocked everyone.
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So Cherubon, she meets this new guy, Shakir, and she's madly in love with him.
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And the two of them, they just want to run off and be together.
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But Cherubon's, you know, she's married and she can't get out of that marriage very easily.
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And so the two of them, Cherubon and Shakir, they're trying to think of, you know, how can we get Cherubon out of this marriage?
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How can we free her?
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And at first, it was like dead end after dead end.
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There was like no way out.
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But then they thought of something, and it was very clever.
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But it was something that they needed help doing.
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It was not just in their power to pull this plan off.
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They needed a third person.
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Specifically, they needed to find another influencer, another beauty influencer.
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And so on the night of August 15th, so this is the night that ultimately Sherabon is found dead inside of her car,
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she found an influencer that was going to be perfect for this plan.
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Her name was Khadija, and she was also a beauty influencer.
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And on the night of the 15th, that's the person that Shereban was going out to meet.
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That was the person she was messaging with on Instagram.
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And so Shereban and also Shakir, they go into Engelstadt and they meet up with Khadija.
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But they didn't fully inform Khadija about what exactly this plan entailed.
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In fact, really all they told Khadija was that, once we meet up with you, you know, we're beauty influencers, we have some really cool beauty products that we'll just give you.
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And Khadija's like, great.
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And so Cherubon and Shakir, they drive up alongside the curb and there's Khadija and she sees them and she's all excited.
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She gets inside the car, inside of Cherubon's Mercedes.
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And once she's inside, she doesn't receive beauty products.
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Instead, Sharabon and Shakir pull out knives and they proceed to stab Khadija to death, right there inside of the car.
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And then once she was dead, Sharabon and Shakir drove the Mercedes right outside of Sharabon's estranged husband's apartment complex.
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They left the car there with the body inside and then Sharabon and Shakir fled.
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It was all part of the plan.
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I mean, Khadija didn't know the plan, but it was all part of Sharabon and Shakir's However, there's one detail that I've left out to this point
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that is effectively the actual reason Cherubon and Shakir were so convinced their big plan was going to work.
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So Cherubon didn't just need some random beauty influencer for their plan to work out.
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No, their plan was that Cherubon would find another beauty influencer that looked a lot like her, hopefully, that they would kill,
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they'd plant their body, and then Cherubon would like take their identity
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and she and Shakir would run off under this new false identity and live their lives, you know, free of the marriage that Sharabon was trapped inside of.
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That was their plan.
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So they start looking for an influencer and they find Khadija and she is like an exact replica of Sharabon.
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They look identical.
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So much so that after they murdered her
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and planted her body inside of Cherubon's car and left her there to be discovered, they had everybody fooled, including Cherubon's own parents.
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They saw the body and they're like, oh, that's my daughter.
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They believed fully it was their daughter.
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The plan worked and the husband's implicated for killing Cherubon.
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Everything's working out.
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But the one person that was not fooled was ultimately the coroner.
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Because when he began doing the autopsy, the body looked exactly like Cherubon's, except their teeth were different.
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They had different dental records, and that is the thing that showed this is not Cherubon.
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This is somebody else.
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And so at the same time that the coroner made this discovery, also all these people in Ingolstadt were calling the police saying, I think I just saw Cherubon.
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I don't think she's dead at all.
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I think she's at this cafe, or I think she's walking down the road over here.
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She seems just fine.
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And initially, police sort of dismissed these tips as being just bad tips, but when they put it all together and they looked at Sharabon's social media and her messages back and forth with Khadija,
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and when they saw a picture of Khadija, they put it all together and they figured it out.
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And so after putting all these things together, they actually went and found Sharabon, who had been spotted on security footage.
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They arrested her, they arrested Shakir, and then after, you know, speaking to them and putting all the evidence together, they figured out that this had been their plan all along.
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And so both Sharabon and Shakir were ultimately found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
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One morning in August of 1987, a 57-year-old woman named Claudia Sessy walked down the aisle of a historic church in Lyon, France.
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In the back of the church, a musician was playing a very solemn him on a pipe organ, and right behind Claudia, four of her sons and nephews were carrying her husband's coffin.
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So, Claudia's husband had died suddenly just a few days ago, and she still really couldn't believe he was gone.
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A part of her kept thinking that like any day now, she was going to get a call from the morgue telling her there'd been a mistake
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and her husband had just been asleep this whole time.
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But, as she took her seat in the front row
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and looked around at all the friends and the family
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that were gathered there wearing black and dabbing at their eyes with handkerchiefs, she finally began to accept the truth.
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Eventually, the organ music dies out and the church goes totally quiet, and the priest makes his way up to the pulpit to begin the funeral mass.
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However, right as he began speaking, there was this sort of muffled sound that at first it was really hard to tell what it was,
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but it was loud enough that it stopped the priest from speaking.
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He stopped what he was doing and sort of looked around, and then people began to gasp in the church because the sound, this muffled sound, it was coming from inside the casket.
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And so Claudia, when she realized that, she shot up to her feet and she's staring at the casket and everyone's like, what's going on?
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And then people began to scream because suddenly they realized what the sound was.
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It was a voice.
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And it was muffled because it was coming from inside the casket and the voice, which was a man's voice, was saying, let me out of here.
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And so the priest, He's overlooking this scene of absolute chaos.
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He's seeing everybody screaming and running around.
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Nobody knows what to make of this.
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He's terrified.
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He's presided over hundreds of funerals before.
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He's never, ever heard of somebody waking up in the middle of their funeral.
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And he's looking over at Claudia, the widow.
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And at first, she seems so happy, like scared, terrified, but happy like her husband is back.
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And she begins to run towards the coffin.
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But she only makes it a few steps before she grabs at her chest and she collapses to the ground.
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And this seemed to snap the priest out of his sort of his shocked days here.
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And he ran down to Claudia and other people were running over to Claudia
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and the priest began yelling for someone to call an ambulance.
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And then he rushed over to the coffin expecting to find that Claudia's husband was somehow still alive, you know, and he was going to open it up and free him.
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But when he opened up the coffin, the husband was obviously dead.
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There's no way he just yelled, let me out of here.
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Not possible.
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He was definitely dead.
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So at first, this was just like a terrifying scandal that was sort of localized.
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But after police investigated and figured out what actually happened inside of that church, this story blew up and ricocheted all around the world because truly,
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it is unbelievable what happened inside of the church on that day.
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It would turn out there was a man in attendance
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that day at the funeral who was both one of Claudia's husband's friends, so he was there, you know, grieving the loss of his friend, and he was also a ventriloquist,
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somebody who's able to throw their voice.
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And he thought it would cheer everyone up if he threw his voice and made it sound like the dead man, his buddy, was crying, you know,
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let me out of here from inside the coffin.
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It was meant to lighten the mood.
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But the prank worked so well that people thought it was real
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and Claudia literally thought it was her husband coming back to life
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and she was so overwhelmed as she ran to her husband that she had a heart attack and died.
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Now the friend, the ventriloquist, immediately took responsibility and felt horrible, he felt like he basically killed Claudia.
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But despite that, police never charged him with any crime because ventriloquism is not illegal.
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On the morning of March 18th, 1963, a 16-year-old girl named Eileen Welch was chatting with her friends outside of her high school in Yorkshire, England.
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It was a few minutes before first period, and there were dozens of other students milling around outside the school, waiting for the bell to ring.
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Eileen was holding an armful of books and telling her friends about what she had done over the weekend, when suddenly she began to scream.
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At that same exact moment, Eileen's friend, who had been standing with her just a moment ago, watched as Eileen just began to rise into the air.
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There was nothing around her lifting her up.
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She just began inexplicably raising into the air, like 30 feet into the air, and she's screaming.
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This friend, she's looking up at her, and all around her, all the other students, they're looking up at Eileen just being suspended in air by some phantom force.
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And Eileen, she's screaming, she's screaming, and then suddenly she comes careening down and slams into the ground so hard, then everybody's just screaming like mad.
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And someone began running towards the school, yelling for someone to call an ambulance.
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Eileen was rushed to the hospital, clearly in agonizing pain with multiple broken bones,
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severe internal injuries, and the first responders and the doctors at the hospital
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and the medical staff did everything they could to save her.
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But just two hours after she smashed into the ground from falling from 30 feet in the air somehow, she died.
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When police went back to the school to begin their investigation into what happened,
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I mean, detectives literally could not believe the dozens of eyewitness accounts.
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The detectives questioned 37 students and teachers who were all outside that day that watched what happened to Eileen.
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And all of them told the same story.
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That Eileen, out of nowhere, just suddenly rose into the air like 30 feet, and she held up there for a second, and then came smashing down.
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Now at first, the police just didn't believe the stories they were being told.
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They're thinking, there's got to be more to this story.
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People don't just raise into the air and smash back down again doesn't happen.
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But when all these accounts were the same, and they all had the same amount of conviction behind them, that these people, they saw this,
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the police realized, like, this is apparently what happened.
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And so they began to assume that the only way this could have happened is
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that this was some product of a bizarre weather phenomenon or something, like a mini tornado, like, lifted her into the air or something.
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So they actually brought in several meteorologists into this investigation,
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but the meteorologists concluded that what everyone claimed to have witnessed was basically scientifically impossible.
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Because in order for the wind to pick someone up, the way they described Eileen being picked up, the winds would need to be blowing at at least 110 miles per hour.
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And there were no winds of anywhere near that speed reported anywhere in England that morning.
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And even if there had been like a sudden gust of wind that was able to to lift Eileen up.
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The reason that still couldn't have happened the way it was described is Eileen was near other people, in close proximity.
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There's no way that she would be the only one affected.
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Other people would have been blown into the sky, but nobody was.
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It was just Eileen.
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To this day, none of the 37 witnesses have changed their stories, and there has never been a scientific explanation for what happened to Eileen.
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And so the cause of her death, to this day, remains a mystery.
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Thank you so much for watching.
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Let me know what you thought of today's episode in the comments.
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And remember, we have hundreds of videos for you to binge right now.
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But if you're looking for a recommendation from me of that one video that's worth your time, well, it's this one right here.
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So give it a watch.
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All right, until next time, see ya.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 266 sentences and 4173 words to shadow. The speech runs for 22:45. The speaker talks fast, about 183 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 86% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| detective noun | /dɪˈtɛktɪv/ | A police officer tasked with collecting evidence and information in order to solve a crime; an investigator. |
| scream verb | /skɹiːm/ | To cry out with a shrill voice; to utter a sudden, sharp outcry, or shrill, loud cry, as in fright or extreme pain; to screech, to shriek. |
| priest noun | /ˈpɹiːst/ | A religious clergyman (clergywoman, clergyperson) who is trained to perform services or sacrifices at a church or temple. |
| coffin noun | /ˈkɔfɪn/ | A closed box in which the body of a dead person is placed for burial. |
| divorce noun | /dɪˈvɔːs/ | The legal dissolution of a marriage. |
| yell verb | /jɛl/ | To shout; holler; make a loud sound with the voice, especially to express intense emotions such as anger or excitement. |
| bedroom noun | /ˈbɛdˌɹum/ | A room in a house, apartment, hotel, or other dwelling where a bed is kept for sleeping. |
| funeral noun | /ˈfju.nəɹ.əl/ | A ceremony to honor and remember a deceased person, often distinguished from a memorial service by the presence of the body of the deceased. |
| smash verb | /smæʃ/ | To break (something brittle) violently. |
| rush verb | /ɹʌʃ/ | To hurry; to perform a task with great haste, often not properly or without thinking carefully. |
| shock noun | /ʃɔk/ | A sudden, heavy impact. |
| alongside | /əˌlɔŋˈsaɪd/ | Side by side with. |
| discovery noun | /dɪˈskʌv.ɹi/ | Something discovered. |
| explanation noun | /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/ | The act or process of explaining. |
| horrible adjective | /ˈhɔɹ.ɪ.bəl/ | Causing horror; terrible; shocking. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| get back verb | Return to where one came from. |
| look around verb | To inspect a building or area. |
| open up verb | To open. |
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. |
| pull out verb | To withdraw; especially of military forces; to retreat. |
| run off verb | To flee or depart quickly. |
| back down verb | To take a less aggressive position in a conflict than one previously had, or has planned to have. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | were reported · was parked · was covered |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | you've come · hasn't been · I've left |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | one who must · anyone who could · voice, which was |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 47 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, they're, couldn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: ethnic /ˈɛθ.nɪk/, gather /ˈɡæðɚ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: smash /smæʃ/, rush /ɹʌʃ/, shock /ʃɔk/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, notification /ˌnoʊtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩/
- Long words — get the stress right: explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, notification /ˌnoʊtɪfɪˈkeɪʃn̩/, primarily /ˈpɹaɪ.mə.ɹə.li/, establishment /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ.mənt/, potentially /pəˈtɛnʃ(ə)li/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like detective, scream, priest.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.