“…it was good quality but extremely insensitive…”
“…Alan is usually better than this. He sounded insane…”
“…I hope the families of the victims sue your ass over this…”
It was my masterpiece. I created the Dark Explorations channel as an outlet for my passions. True Crime had always been a favorite subject of mine and after dropping out of college it felt like a risk worth taking. It had worked pretty well at first. I was nearing 40,000 subscribers and I saw the golden hilltop ahead, the job doing something I loved. I was able to absorb audiences with in-depth commentary and the chance to discover rarely covered mysteries from across the country.
I was always more confident than many wished and I will admit that. But never without evidence and reason, I can assure my audience that I am entirely fact-driven and logical. I wasn’t someone looking to make money off of creating boogeyman theories for some long lost murder. I only cared for solving the unknown and bringing the truth to light. Many times people disagreed, but there was no reasoning that could win over my theory. I was a detective without a badge. A vigilante doing the work that the lazy and ignorant government could not. This video was going to be my magnus opus of my career so far. The story of Sofia Bercowisz had been told thousands of times but I found something that others didn’t.
Sofia Bercowisz was born January 5th 2000 to a large family in Baton Rogue, Louisiana. Community and church groups in Bercowisz’s early years described the family as pious fundamentalist christians. They homeschooled their seven kids, Sofia being the oldest daughter. The Bercowisz mother was a church marriage counselor while her husband was an accountant who frequently left home for business. Church members on facebook spoke about Bercowisz's mother’s therapy, how it focused on feminine subservience to the husband and the importance of girls to be pious and pure of the dark influences of the world. Children should be taught this and corrections should be swift and unforgettable.
Violence was not unknown in the Bercowisz home and on two separate occasions the cries of a young girl were reported by neighbors to the police, no action beyond a wellness check was taken that returned negative. Sofia created her own internet presence in her teenage years through online forums. She frequented realms of alternative culture, she almost exclusively searched for the opposite of her home life of conservative domination. Her fascination only grew stronger as the years passed and she became engrossed in the fictional world of the internet. Users attached to her were seen discussing Satanism, BDSM, and surviving domestic abuse and running away. Sofia would be seen exclusively in long-sleeves beginning around this time, a history of self-inflicted wounds or an increase in familial violence is likely.
In the year 2016, she found an online boyfriend in New Orleans, a twenty year old high school dropout who toured Louisiana playing Punk music. The two bonded quickly through online messages and became obsessed with each other, they sent explicit messages, discussed idealistic futures, and spoke of the daily pains of life. Sofia had grown with her body bound in chains and could not wiggle without receiving a blow. To her, this was her best opportunity. On July 31st, her boyfriend would park and wait in a parking lot near Sofia's home. Sofia collected a backpack of multiple clothes, hygiene products, personal electronics, and personal items and had planned to run away.
Things did not go as planned. The exact details of the incident are unknown but can be pieced together from the scene. The Bercowisz mother had multiple broken bones in her hands, a torn muscle in her ankle, a broken nose, a caved-in impact on her temple from a blunt object smashed over head while she was on the ground, and twenty stab wounds in the chest and stomach post-humously. Multiple objects were broken in the living room that she bleed-out in from the result of the struggle between the two. Her father was found in a similar condition in the master bedroom. All six of her siblings were stabbed to death in their bedrooms, their positions imply for some of them to have happened in their sleep.
Sofia met her boyfriend afterwards. The meeting was caught on a camera from a gas station across the street. The boyfriend and Sofia argued upon meeting, a possible result of her informing him of her actions. The boyfriend leaned into his car to grab something, possibly his phone, when Sofia stabbed him in the back. Sofia pulled him out of the car and stabbed him thirty more times in both the back and neck. She took the car keys, waited eight minutes, then drove away. Sofia would be on the run from police for the next four days as she evaded state troopers using I-55 to head into Mississippi and drive north towards Memphis. During the chase, she killed seven more individuals for food, shelter, or their cars.
While crossing the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, a police chase began which ended in Sofia colliding with a police cruiser and sending both vehicles into the Mississippi River. The strong currents on that day saw both vehicles swept under and drowning both drivers. This is believed to be the conclusion to Sofia Bercowisz’s story. This is what I told my viewers in the first half of the video. But I have reason to believe better. The only corpse at the scene of her car was a mutilated girl who was partially hanging out of the front window, nothing forensically was done to prove it was Sofia. I was able to find a pattern of murders that matched Sofia’s along I-40 into the Tennessee countryside going into 2018.
I made the theory that Sofia Bercowisz was both alive and still active in the east of the United States. My corpus of evidence was massive and seemed uncrackable. Too many similar mysteries to not be clearly connected. This was my greatest work yet but I remain perplexed. How could they respond like this? They speak as if I committed some crime other than finding the truth. I did no harm to the victims by connecting them to this case. They should be thanking me for finding justice! My logic was sound and impenetrable.
The video statistics were clear about the public’s opinion no matter how flawed it was, 85% disliked. I had not slept since I posted the video over 24 hours ago. I scrolled through comments in my dark apartment and the insults began to feel numb. I just wanted to find something good to take away from it all. I had never hid a video from the public before and to hide it and apologize felt like an admission of guilt, or to being incorrect. I was not guilty, these people just couldn’t see it. But to leave it up, will only hurt my channel more.
A small chirp came from my laptop as a notification sounded. It woke me from my cemented stare in a sense of bewilderment. I blinked a few times to wake my tired eyes and realize what just happened. A Super Thanks? Someone donated a single dollar on my video? I quickly pulled up the comment to see why I was receiving one on such an unpopular video. The user’s name was just a burner email and provided no photo for the profile picture.
“Do you think you could find out what happened to Roxane Elliot?”
Roxane Elliot? She was a 18 year old mass shooter in 2023. She killed four girls in her home for troubled teens, before driving to her high school, killing two more people in the parking lot, then getting shot by a police officer. Normally the story would end there but, her ambulance wrecked with multiple vehicles on the way to the hospital and the fire that followed destroyed her body. Her case was interesting for how it ended but typical of troubled teenagers turned mass shooters. Did this person think she was alive?
I don’t know exactly why I thought the way I did. I didn’t believe I could track her down under the presumption she was alive. For some reason though, I decided to respond to this kind person who reached out to me on my worst performing video yet with an innocent seeming question.
“I can definitely look into her case and try to dig up something. It’s a long shot, but if there’s something, I will find it.”
That seemed like an adequate response. I looked over to the time on my computer; 2:33 AM. I needed to sleep. My eyes hurt from staring at this screen and simply reading negative comments won’t turn them good. I’ll decide when I wake up what I should do. I closed the laptop and my eyes slowly adjusted to the change in light. The room was barren with no posters on the walls or sign of personality in its inhabitance. I had started renting this place a year ago but never bothered to change it into something other than a place of rest.
I stood from my desk to the laying position on my bed. My hunched back cried in an ache of relief to be flat on the soft surface. My eyes did not last long as they shut out the world around me. I slept peacefully in my bed, uncaring to the world around me.