CHICAGO—In a courthouse packed this morning with law enforcement and word game enthusiasts alike, an expressionless Alan Cole pleaded his innocence in connection with the gruesome “MadLibs” killing spree that has rocked the Midwest in its wake.
“I could not have committed these terrible—um…these terrible—” stammered Cole, squinting to read his prepared statement. “Sweater cows. I could never have committed these terrible sweater cows.”
He added stoically, “To anyone out there listening, I just want to say, ‘Sohcahtoa.’”
Today’s arraignment marks a new chapter in a sinuous, years’ long saga that saw its first turning point only last January.
“Every few weeks a new letter would arrive, taunting us,” said Detective Shane Benson. “It was always ‘Doink me if you can’ this, or ‘So close and yet so doinked’ that. It starts to feel ridiculous after awhile.”
Then when all seemed hopeless, something caught Benson’s eye.
He explained: “Each time, it was just words cut out from magazines, glued to the paper to form a message. Finally we got one and I saw how each ‘o’ in ‘soft, lowing voice of Legion’ looked like the O in O Magazine—and then in ‘dingleberries’, every e and r was from Reader’s Digest.”
With help from third-party data affiliates and AI imaging, Benson’s team narrowed their focus to a handful of “persons of interest” whose subscription history matched the magazines used to craft the letters. “Our first approach was to see if any of the names seemed like they might be aliases, but that turned into a disaster,” said Benson, alluding to the department’s early interrogation of Lakeview resident Oreocheesecake McDeeznuts.
“The mix-up with Oreocheesecake McDeeznuts brought the case to a halt,” commented legal expert Darius Knox. “Another airball like that could have meant lawsuit city.”
“The whole thing was very unsettling, but thankfully it all got straightened out,” said McDeeznuts, 29, a social worker and deacon at his local parish.
The mishap left investigators at a loss for how to proceed until several months later, when an unlikely noise complaint came in. “We received one call from a resident near Clark and Elm, roughly a block from where Old Town was having their annual GrammarFest,” said 311 dispatcher Sheryl Kanner. “They said someone in the Airbnb next door was yelling, ‘The sow is lime! The sow is lime!’—and had been making farm animal noises for hours.”
When Officer Alec Lyndell arrived and went into the Airbnb vestibule to knock, a lanky figure began climbing out from a ground floor window.
“I saw the window slide open from where I was by the curb,” said Officer Robert Foryth, Lyndwell’s partner that night. “I had stayed outside to keep order while a Boggle event was letting out.”
Foryth quickly subdued the figure, who identified himself as none other than Alan Cole, a dentist from Rockford. The officers then searched Cole’s Airbnb, finding an old Ouija board and vocabulary-related paraphernalia.
“‘Stop me before I “dill” again’ had been etched into a Garfield desk lamp,” Lyndell later told reporters.
Police discovered in the aftermath that Cole was a match for one of the names on Detective Benson’s list, and the resulting warrant allowed investigators to enter the dentist’s home and link what they discovered there to crime scenes that had once confounded them.
“It would seem old Benson has ‘doinked’ his man in the end after all,” quipped the detective at the time, beaming.
News of Cole’s arrest has left his quiet Rockford community reeling to reconcile the allegations with the man they once thought they knew. “He was so mild-mannered and nice,” said one neighbor. “Every so often he’d come knock on our door, asking for a noun.”
With his bail now set at $1.3 million, Cole told reporters this afternoon that he has full confidence in his attorneys, and “thwacks” with them daily. A grand jury trial is scheduled to start next week.
Meanwhile, those affected by all that has transpired continue to pick up the pieces.
“I just hope everything can go back to normal soon,” Oreocheesecake McDeeznuts concluded.