The following interview discusses the entirety of the Netflix series The Watcher as well as the New York Magazine articles “The Haunting of a Dream House†and “Taking Another Look at The Watcher.â€
Back in 2018, New York Magazine published a story by Reeves Wiedeman filled with nightmare fuel for homeowners: An unknown menace was terrorizing a family in Westfield, New Jersey, with a series of letters about them and their newly purchased $1.3 million home. Branding themself “The Watcher,†the author of these screeds wrote that they were “put in charge of watching and waiting†for the house’s “second coming†and requested “young blood†for it in the form of children. (You know, normal stuff.) Derek Broaddus, Maria Broaddus, and their three kids never moved into 657 Boulevard because of the increasingly erratic threats; they spent the ensuing years trying to sell the house, despite its now-tainted reputation, and figure out the culprit’s identity. Their story, with many creative flourishes from Ryan Murphy, is now the subject of the Netflix miniseries The Watcher.
Wiedeman, a features reporter, has been the authority on the Watcher case ever since he began his investigation. Now he’s fact-checking the most notable aspects of series, including the fate of the Broadduses: “They just want to move on. They don’t want a lot about their lives out there,†he says. “For them, it’s been a balance between obsessing for years about the case and who did this to them but also trying to get on with their lives.â€
How did this story fall into your orbit all those years ago?
To give credit where it’s due, Alexis Swerdloff, who was editing The Strategist at the time, had the idea. It happened around the time the local story had gone viral in 2015. It was kind of like, “That was weird, and it never got resolved, so let’s see if we can solve it.†At the very least, we’ll be able to give a full accounting of what happened and what life was like in this town. A nefarious real-estate agent didn’t leak the story to “Page Six,†but it did go viral before my piece, and the family did have to deal with that.
The family buys and moves into 657 Boulevard quickly in the premiere. How close did the Broadduses get to living in their dream house?
They had contractors working on the basement. They were doing some little projects. I don’t believe a new kitchen island was part of the renovations. It was more like, This is an old house, and there are a few things that need fixing up structurally. I know they were installing a French drain, for instance, in the basement. They weren’t New Yorkers leaving the city; they had been living in Westfield for a few years at a house nearby and were still staying there while the renovations were happening. They were heading over to 657 Boulevard, dropping stuff off. They weren’t planning to start living there immediately.
They got the first letter two days or so after the closing. Once they got that, it was like, Okay, well, we’re certainly not going to go to sleep here.
No Carrara marble was being replaced with wood in the kitchen?
Pasta sauce and stained marble — is that a thing? As far as I know, there was no marble countertop being replaced with a butcher block.
Did the house’s architectural quirks and secrets mirror 657 Boulevard? Was there an underground labyrinth of tunnels or stair passageways?
Not as far as I know. There was also no dumbwaiter. There was a basement, but the Broadduses never found tunnels, and they had obviously done a thorough home inspection. Once the letters started coming, they did an extra “Okay, is there weird stuff in here?†As the Watcher’s letters said, “Have you looked in the walls?†There was nothing in the walls, as far as they were able to find.
So there’s no reason to believe The Watcher ever terrorized the house from inside it?
Alarms did go off inside the house a few times. Derek did spend a few nights there, looking around and making sure there wasn’t someone just hanging out in their yard or coming into the house at night. But no, there were no people randomly showing up inside the house.
There are many creative licenses taken in the show, but the names of Westfield and 657 Boulevard weren’t changed. Why is that?
That would be a question for Netflix. I don’t know what the balance was between fictionalizing the story. The Broadduses requested they not use their name, so the series honored that. I think there was some desire to be connected to the real story, at least in certain ways.
The Watcher presents the idea that 657 Boulevard, as well as other homes in the area, were targeted with letters by this person for years before the new family moved in. Is any of that true?
The only two letters from The Watcher we know of beyond the ones the Broaddus family received was one letter that was sent to the prior owners — the people who sold them the house. It arrived shortly before the sale was closed. According to that family, it was signed by The Watcher, but it was more admiring and thanking this family for taking care of the house over the years. It wasn’t threatening or spooky in the way of the letters the Broadduses received. That family threw it away and didn’t think anything of it until this happened.
Later, once the story went viral, another family on the block a few doors down told the police they had also gotten a letter. I don’t know very many details about it because the family didn’t want to talk to me about it. But it was a letter from The Watcher to a different house on that block.
Did that family indicate if that letter was more threatening or admiring in nature?
It was more in the vein of the other letter — an admiration about the house. That family had been there for a while; their kids were older.
How many letters in total did the Broadduses receive?
There were three letters originally. The first one arrived a few days after they bought the house, and the second one arrived a few weeks later. Then the third one arrived about a month after that, so, in total, they received three in a time frame of six weeks. Then a fourth arrived at the house about three years later. It was during this period when the Broadduses were going through this whole thing with the town zoning board. They were trying to get a variance to subdivide the property to sell it to a developer. They were having trouble selling the house because they were choosing to tell people about the letters.
Their idea was they could sell it to a developer, who could then build two houses on the property. The Broadduses could then make the numbers work and recoup some of their monetary losses. This was a big deal in Westfield. Some people were very upset that an old home was going to be torn down in this neighborhood with a bunch of old homes. That fourth letter is different than the other ones — it’s angrier, and it was focused on that. It’s an open question as to whether that was from the same person or if it was a copycat situation.
Let’s talk about suspects. We’re introduced to neighbors, a real-estate agent, an English teacher, and a surveillance-company-owning gamer. How many of these characters are rooted in reality?
Pretty close. Two of the early suspects were from a family that lived next door to the Broadduses: an older woman in her 90s and a couple of her adult children living with her. Initial theories focused on them for some reasons that are understandable and others that are a little unfair. They were kind of quirky, and one of the sons was diagnosed as schizophrenic. People in the neighborhood knew him as an odd guy who was ultimately harmless. A version of that family is played by Mia Farrow and Terry Kinney.
There was another older couple, who are paralleled by Richard Kind and Margo Martindale. They lived behind 657 Boulevard and had these two chairs in their backyard that faced the Broadduses at an unusually close proximity. The Broadduses’ house painter said he remembered it as being strange; he was working on the house and saw the husband sitting in this chair, hanging out, doing nothing and looking at the Broadduses’ house. At one point, there was a little dispute about a tree limb that fell onto the fence between the properties, but it wasn’t the aggressively antagonistic relationship portrayed onscreen.
The security-guard kid is a creation. The Broadduses did talk to a security person about ways to protect the house. Separately, there was a police officer who was observing the house to see if anyone suspicious came by. He saw a young couple parked in front of the house. Eventually, some officers pulled them over to find out what they were doing. According to the girlfriend, her boyfriend apparently played video games, and his screen name was “The Watcher.†The trouble with this theory is that I don’t know much about this kid otherwise, even though the police officer told me about him. The police department was never able to actually interview him; he had been living somewhere else out of town, and for this kind of case, they weren’t going to be able to compel this kid to appear.
Was there a historical society interested in preserving the house?
There is a very active historical society in the town, but the neighbors next door weren’t a part of it. The society only got involved when the Broadduses attempted to tear down the house. They were trying to fight that.
Was the private investigator hired by the Broadduses as fabulous as the one portrayed by Noma Dumezweni?
I have met Frank Shea, who is a retired New York City police officer who now works as a private investigator. He is much more out of NYPD central casting than the show’s Theodora Birch. The family did hire a private investigator, but unless he’s hiding something, Frank Shea was definitely not a jazz singer in his former life.
The Watcher possesses a level of violence that’s not confined to mail threats — two animals are murdered in the house throughout the course of the show. How violent did things get with the Broadduses?
The Broadduses didn’t have a ferret, so there was no dead ferret or dead dog. This is one of those instances where you have to bring a little extra menace to the screen. There were no phone calls — or no serious phone calls. It was restricted to really creepy and threatening letters.
There’s nearly an entire episode dedicated to a man named John Graff, whose story of meticulously murdering his family at 657 Boulevard parallels the real-life Westfield case of John List. But there’s no way List and his family actually lived in that house, right?
Not at all. They lived in a different house in Westfield. I mean, people live in that house now. It did go through a period of time of being a place you didn’t want to touch, but it’s now just a normal house in Westfield. That mass murder happened in the early ’70; he murdered his whole family in his house and went on the run for decades. He was a fugitive for a long time before he was eventually caught.
And then we had to deal with poor Richard Kind and Margo Martindale getting reverse murdered.
That was weird. I remember talking to someone in the prosecutor’s office who had been there for a long time, and he told me, “I don’t think we’ve had a murder in Westfield in 20 years.†This is not a place where that sort of thing happens. Charles Addams of Addams Family fame is from there. There’s all of these scary and spooky things, but this isn’t a place where crime is really an issue. When I was reporting the story, people were complaining about the police enforcing parking violations in downtown Westfield. That’s the level of criminality — leaving your car too long in the nice little downtown area.
Forensically, has the biggest breakthrough been that a woman licked the envelopes?
Yes. There were no fingerprints on the envelope that were useful in any way. The handwriting — which people finally got to see in the story update — is not very easy to read into. It’s messy, and the person maybe even intentionally used their nondominant hand. So we have the words and letters, and this DNA analysis says that whoever licked the envelopes closed had female DNA. We don’t know whether that woman is The Watcher or, as the show suggested, someone who offered to lick the envelopes for someone else.
Was anything gleaned from The Watcher’s handwriting?
Their handwriting was very neat, obviously. The letters themselves were typewritten. One minor thing that was different in the show, though, is that all the letters are signed with “I am The Watcher†in the same script. With the actual letters, the text was in some normal Microsoft Word font, and the signature just said, “The Watcher,†in this cursive, flowery, old-timey script — a different font was consciously chosen for that. The phrase “I am The Watcher†was only in the body of one of the letters.
Did you ever get threats or letters while reporting the story?
No, I didn’t. I wondered if I was going to at some point. But I never got anything through email, over the phone, or at my address.
Were you hoping to receive something?
Only in a “Well, here’s some new evidence†sort of way — if I could turn this letter over to the people investigating the case, help look at it, and figure out some clues from it. I do remember publishing the story and thinking, Oh, I don’t know if whoever would do this would find my address. So my answer is yes and no: I’m not looking to be scared or found, but if it would help solve the case, I would be happy to serve as bait.
Who are you inclined to say was The Watcher?
As close as I can get to an answer is I do think it was someone who lived very close by. An immediate neighbor to the house.
Everyone is intrigued by the ideas of “Was it a jilted buyer? Was it a real-estate agent who wanted the house? Was it someone with a vendetta?†But if you look at the letters and the amount of knowledge about the house and the amount of knowledge about what the Broadduses were doing there in those early days, it feels like it has to be someone very nearby.
The show’s conclusion also does not give a definitive answer as to who The Watcher is. Where does the case now stand?
The prosecutor’s office told me the case is not active. They don’t have investigators spending a lot of time decoding the letters or looking for new clues — largely because there isn’t new evidence, as opposed to them not wanting to solve it. While there are more “serious†crimes they have to deal with, this one obviously got a lot of attention. They want to solve it the same way amateur detectives want to figure this out. Which is to say it’s not active, but it’s also not closed.
A hope of mine is we put the handwriting out there and somebody notices something. Maybe there’s enough pressure to do the forensic-genealogy idea that we talked about in the update to the story. But I think, short of someone being able to identify the handwriting or a DNA match, I fear this mystery may never be solved.
In your follow-up piece about the case, you reported that Westfield’s mayor said the town’s investigation was “exhaustive†and left “no stone unturned.†Would you say that’s true?
No. I remember calling neighbors of the house — even neighbors who aren’t necessarily too worked up about this whole thing — and they said the police never even talked to them. Like, “I live right next door to the house, and they didn’t talk to me.†To be clear, that was from the very beginning of the investigation. There have been, since then, a lot of attempts to try to solve it.
But what’s frustrating is everyone knows from watching crime procedurals that oftentimes you don’t solve a case if you don’t get the evidence right away. So I think the investigation wasn’t exhaustive. It’s a tricky crime to prove. You can quickly jump to assumptions, but if you can’t catch someone by just confessing to it, you don’t have a lot of evidence to go on. I’m sympathetic to that and to the fact that horrendous crimes go unsolved all the time. At the end of the day, these were letters, and thankfully, it didn’t get worse than that. But there was certainly more that could have been done if the department had chosen to take this more seriously from the start.
If this culprit is ever apprehended, what would they be charged with?
It’s unclear. There are stalking statutes in New Jersey. There’s harassment as a crime. At one point, the Broadduses talked to someone who suggested terrorism statutes could apply. But these were letters, and it wasn’t more than that. I think, for a lot of people — the Broadduses included — they’ve tried to just move on. The relief for them would be in knowing who it was, knowing this is resolved, and knowing this person isn’t going to do this again. The legal punishment would always have been pretty minimal. That’s partly what led the police to not throw other resources into what was ultimately a minor crime.
When was the last time you spoke with the Broaddus family? Are they still hopeful they can catch this person?
The priority for them is to move on. This sucked up so much of their time and energy and money in a lot of ways. They are quintessential American suburbanites who want to be able to live their lives, take their kids to soccer games, and enjoy going to the Jersey Shore. I think they know that, at this point, even if they were to catch this person, what good would it do? Well, it would bring some additional closure for them, and the show is obviously going to bring some attention to the case. Maybe there’s a small chance it gets solved because of The Watcher. Hopefully, for the Broadduses, this is the last big thing — short of someone being identified — that they’ll have to deal with.
There was a huge bidding war from studios to adapt your story. How did Netflix and Ryan Murphy come out on top?
Very quickly, there was tons of interest. I was getting emails from producers, and people were reaching out to the Broadduses. There were a series of calls with big-time producers who were interested; there were different movie studios and streamers who wanted to get it. Initially, Ryan Murphy wasn’t involved; a guy named Eric Newman, a producer best known for Narcos, had a deal with Netflix. The day before Thanksgiving in 2018 — a week after the story was published — Newman and another producer flew to meet me for breakfast in Chicago and try to convince me to let them adapt the story. And so Netflix purchased the rights, and only later did it become a Ryan Murphy project.
The Broadduses didn’t get very involved. They were not on any of these calls. They didn’t really want to be — they didn’t care about the creative vision for this.
Was there anything in particular that irked you about how the show presented this story?
I want to emphasize that the Broadduses wanted it to be as different from their life as possible, and so, for instance, the show’s family has two kids as opposed to three. All three of their kids, at the time this was happening, were under 10 years old. The onscreen daughter is in high school. In my protectiveness of the family, I guess I’m channeling Bobby Cannavale: Did you have to have the weird 19-year-old–16-year-old romance? That’s totally fictionalized.
I’ll admit that I would have liked some resolution. It felt like there were a lot of loose ends left. Like that girl in the bedroom, was she a ghost? Was it some weirdo who snuck in? Why was Mia Farrow harboring a guy who murdered three people across the street from her? Even if you’re not going to tie up the resolution of who The Watcher is, I would’ve liked more explanations. But I don’t want to be too critical because I don’t make TV shows.
Yeah, the ending felt very Hot Fuzz to me. All of these historical society people were a collective Watcher, I guess?
Right. I did like that it sucked in Bobby Cannavale’s character to become obsessed with it. And then his wife watches him. It’s like a non-virtuous circle of people watching each other and becoming obsessed with the house.