THE DARK BENEATH: The Autopsy Photo That Showed the Killer (Case File #22)
- Loretta & David Allseitz
- Jan 20
- 4 min read
The Dark Beneath is fiction—lore, not evidence. If you take it as fact, that’s between you, your lying uncle, and whatever’s creeping around your woods at 2 a.m.
CASE FILE #22
If you spend enough time around violent death in East Texas, you learn there’s a difference between what’s done and what’s finished.
Most murders are done quickly.
Finished? Not so much.
They linger in paperwork, in photos, in evidence lockers that smell faintly like bleach no matter how often they’re cleaned. They settle into the background of towns that don’t have the luxury of pretending violence is rare, only inconvenient.
And sometimes, the case doesn’t stop moving just because the body does.
The Photo That Didn’t Belong to Anyone in the Room
The autopsy was routine.
Middle-aged male. Rural property. Blunt force trauma followed by postmortem injury that suggested anger, not efficiency. The kind of killing that happens when someone doesn’t want to stop once they’ve started.
The medical examiner worked alone, like most of them do out here. Fluorescent lights. Stainless steel table. Camera positioned where it always went.
The photographs were clean. Documented. Predictable.
Until they weren’t.
It wasn’t something you noticed right away, because no one ever looks at the background of autopsy photos first. You look at wounds. You look at damage. You look at what went wrong.
It wasn’t until later, during review, that someone paused on a frame too long and felt that familiar tightening in the chest—the one that tells you something is off, but you don’t yet know how to explain it.
There was a face in the image.
Why It Didn’t Make Sense
The reflection appeared faintly in the stainless steel surface beside the body, distorted just enough to make it easy to dismiss if you wanted to. It wasn’t the medical examiner. It wasn’t the photographer. It wasn’t any piece of equipment.
It was a man’s face, angled as if standing too close to the table, looking down at the body with a familiarity that didn’t belong to a stranger.
No one remembered anyone else being in the room.
No access logs showed an entry.
The examiner chalked it up to distortion. Reflections bend. Stainless steel lies. Cameras catch things human eyes don’t.
The photo was archived.
The case moved forward.
When the Face Came Back
Months later, another homicide. Different county. Different victim. Same kind of violence—messy, personal, excessive. The autopsy photos were logged, uploaded, reviewed.
And there it was again.
Same face.
Same angle.
Same expression.
Not clearer. Not closer. Just… present.
This time, someone checked.
They pulled the first image side by side with the second.
The reflections matched too well.
What the Face Wasn’t
It wasn’t a known suspect.
It wasn’t law enforcement.
It wasn’t medical staff.
Facial recognition software returned nothing useful, just a handful of false positives and warnings about image quality. The man in the reflection didn’t age between cases. Didn’t change his posture. Didn’t move closer or farther away.
He was always exactly where the violence ended.
The Pattern Nobody Wanted
Over the next few years, the face appeared sporadically, never announced, never consistent enough to make it obvious unless you were already looking for it.
It showed up in autopsy photos tied to violent crimes that shared one thing in common: rage.
Not profit.
Not necessity.
Not panic.
Just rage.
Victims beaten past the point of death. Injuries that didn’t serve a purpose except expression.
The kind of cases that made investigators talk less and drink more.
And every time the face appeared, the killer was never found.
The One Time It Almost Made Sense
In one case, a suspect was arrested. Local man. Prior history. Confession that didn’t quite line up, but close enough for comfort.
During trial prep, someone reviewed the autopsy photos again.
The face was there.
This time, the resemblance was unsettling.
Not identical.
But close enough that no one wanted to say it out loud.
The suspect was convicted.
The face never appeared in another photo tied to that pattern again.
Why No One Officially Acknowledged It
You don’t put reflections in reports.
You don’t testify about stainless steel lying.
You don’t tell a jury that sometimes the camera catches something that wasn’t supposed to stay behind.
The photos remain in evidence lockers and digital archives, flagged only by the people who know what to look for—and who have learned not to point it out unless they want the room to go quiet.
What Locals Believe
Around here, people don’t say the killer was haunting the bodies.
They say some men leave impressions deeper than fingerprints.
They say some violence carries its author with it, long after the hands stop working.
And they say if you ever look too closely at the wrong photograph, you might realize the face isn’t watching the body at all.
It’s watching you.
⚠️ FINAL WORD
Some killers don’t run.
They don’t hide.
They don’t even leave the room.
They just step back, let the work speak for itself,
and make sure they’re still in the picture when the body is all that’s left.
Alright, Villains—what’s your theory?
The dark doesn’t explain itself. And Neither do I.
If CASE FILE #22 is the first you're reading, make sure to go back and check out "The Dark Beneath" series of posts! The Dark Beneath: Scary Folklore & Whispers in Texas
-Unmasking Evil
Villains Welcome.
*If you’re drawn to dark truths and the stories they leave behind, start with The Dollmaker of Point on Amazon.
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