Oklahoma City
Saturday, February 31st

  Police discover the dead bodies of two Nichols Hills’ children early Saturday morning. Police were summoned multiple times to Nichols Hills late Friday night and early Saturday morning. The first call to police, at approximately 9:37 PM, was due to complaints of threatening phone calls. When police were summoned a second time, they discovered the dead bodies of two young children.

Oklahoma City Police Department spokesperson Paco Balderama stated that the cause of death for the two children has been rule homicide in both cases.

“We definitely have a double homicide on our hands,” Balderama said.


Balderama said that there was a third child in the home-a 16-year-old babysitter, who was physically unharmed. Balderama stated, however, that she received several threatening phone calls throughout the night.

“We aren’t sure just yet, but we have reason to believe the person she (the babysitter) talked to on the phone is our suspect,” Balderama said. “She kept receiving calls that she thought were pranks at first.”

Friday night, married couple Jeff and Debora Jarrett planned a special evening for just the two them. They hired a babysitter for the night. According to Balderama, Mr. and Mrs. Jarrett had put their two children to bed for the night before the babysitter even arrived at their home. The babysitter never saw nor interacted with either child; she was there in case the children woke up.

Balderama stated that the babysitter stayed in the family’s living room for the night, watching movies and browsing the internet on her laptop. Balderama said that the first threatening call was received at 8:11 PM.

“She really didn’t think much of the call,” Balderama said. “She thought it was a prank.”

Balderama said several more threatening calls were received between 8:11 PM Friday and 9:37 PM Friday-the time of the first call to police.

Balderama stated that the dispatcher sent someone to the home to get a personal statement from the babysitter, but the officer found nothing out of the ordinary and ruled the calls pranks.

According to Balderama, the calls resumed at 11:53 PM Friday. This time, the babysitter called the phone company, Southwestern Bell, instead of police.

“(Southwestern Bell) told her that all the calls were coming from an upstairs phone extension,” Balderama said. “When she heard that, she ran outside of the house as fast as she could.”

Using her cell phone, the babysitter called police again, at approximately 12:10 AM Saturday.

“We sent several units over to the house,” Balderama said. “We searched the home, finding only the deceased children and no one else.”

Balderama said that the police are unsure about when and how the suspect escaped the home.
“This is going to be extremely rough for investigators,” Balderama said. “We are asking neighbors or anyone who may have been driving down this street Friday night if they saw anything suspicious. We have no eyewitnesses, and we know of no one with motive. This case is going to be difficult.”

Balderama stated that the babysitter, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Jarrett, are being interviewed by investigators, but are not considered suspects at this time.




Author's Notes

The original story is very popular; several movies have used elements of this story, and at least one movie is solely about this story. I have written the story as if it were a newspaper article. I have given names to the parents of the children, Jeff and Debora Jarrett- names that I randomly thought of. Paco Balderama is the name of the real Oklahoma City Police Department spokesperson. I did not change much of the original story. I added the part about the girl having a cell phone and a laptop computer to make the story more modern. I have created a fake journalist for this story, Allison Smith. I do not think it would be realistic for one journalist to write all the stories on such a heavy news day. Nichols Hills is a rich neighborhood in Northwest Oklahoma City. I placed the story in that area of the city, because in the original story, the babysitter is said to have been in a large house. I also added the parts about the girl calling the police before calling the phone company. Lastly, In my version the girl is not being chased out of the house by the killer. Instead, she runs out of the house on her own. This is so the police in my story have no witnesses, or description of the criminal.

Bibliography

Title: The Babysitter and The Man Upstairs
Websource:Snopes.com