Charlie Allen Jr.

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1:21This episode is brought to you by 20th Century Studios upcoming comedy, Ella McKay. From Academy Award-winning writer-director James L. Brooks, Emma Mackey plays Ella McKay, an idealistic young woman who juggles family and work in a story about the people you love and how to survive them. Featuring an all-star cast, including Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Loudon, Kumail Nanjiani, Iowa Debris, Julie Kavner, with Albert Brooks and Woody Harrelson. Ella McKay, in theaters December 12. Voices for Justice is a podcast that uses adult language and discusses sensitive and potentially triggering topics, including violence, abuse, and murder.

2:02This podcast may not be appropriate for younger audiences. All parties are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Some names have been changed or omitted per their request or for safety purposes. Listener discretion is advised. My name is Sarah Turney and this is Voices for Justice.

2:26Today, I'm discussing the case of Charlie Allen Jr., also known as Neo Babson Maximus. On a Thursday in 2007, near the start of the fall semester of his senior year at UMass Dartmouth, Charlie Allen Jr.'s day begins really as nothing out of the ordinary. He plays tennis with a friend, they grab some food, and part ways. The plan was to meet a few hours later to go to a party. And then Charlie disappears. This is the case of Charlie Allen Jr.

3:02Charlie was born in 1985 to his parents Anne and Charles Allen. While he was their first child, he wouldn't be their only one for long. Fifteen months later, his sister Brittany was born, followed by his youngest sister, Persephone. They grew up mostly in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and spent their summers in Gloucester. As Charlie got older, he tried out a ton of different sports and hobbies, but video games and tennis seemed to be what stuck. He eventually tried to make them both into careers, and he excels at both. But it does seem that video games are what he's ultimately known for. Now, it seems that Charlie played on both consoles and PC, and eventually adopted the name Neo in the gaming world, as he climbed the ranks of the best Half-Life and Half-Life Counter-Strike players in the world.

3:53Charlie takes this really seriously, he's traveling to compete, and quickly becomes well-known in the gaming community. He's even featured in the news for this several times as a teenager. And I just want to say that professional gaming really isn't anything to scoff at. Even back in the early 2000s when professional gaming wasn't as big, you could still make thousands of dollars in these gaming competitions, and turn it into a full-time career. For example, when Charlie competed in the Cyber Athlete Professional League World Championship in January 2002, his team could have won$50 ,000. Adjusted for inflation, that's about$100 ,000 for one competition.

4:36Nowadays, it's even easier with streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube, where people are making millions of dollars a year by just playing video games. Now, it does seem like Charlie played with a few different gaming teams and formed a few of his own, but his Half-Life Counter-Strike team, Domain of Pain, was ranked number 3 in the US in online and local tournament play, with Charlie being considered the best not just in the nation, but in the world for Half-Life, and one of the top for Counter-Strike specifically. So when Charlie's winning competitions, traveling, and being featured in the news for playing video games, I could absolutely see why he would consider this a viable career path, and really why it began to consume his life.

5:23In reporting by the Haverhill-Gazette, Charlie explains that during his freshman year in high school, his time was essentially consumed by half-life. He became very pale with skipping meals and staying up late to get his gaming hours in. To be completely honest, this sounds like a lot of people I met who just loved playing a certain video game or video games in general. But I think it's important to consider that in this case, at some point in high school, Charlie is diagnosed with both bipolar and manic depression, according to his family. So this factor does make it harder for me to interpret Charlie's deep dive into the gaming world.

6:02But we do know that his parents get him help for this, he finds a therapist, and medication that works for him. And while he does get, of course, swept up in this excitement of kind of being this teenage video game celebrity, he doesn't let it go to his head and derail his entire life. He graduates from Haberill High school in 2003 and enrolls at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, choosing psychology as his major. He does well. So well, he considers applying for medical school. And as he gets through his first few years of his studies, his love of video games doesn't exactly wane, but he does begin to heavily focus on tennis.

6:43Just like with video games, Charlie wants to be the best, and he does qualify for his tennis team at UMass Dartmouth. Charlie is really all in on this. In the summer of 2007, between his junior and senior year, he even changed his name in hopes of distinguishing himself in the tennis world. His new legal name is Neo Babson Maximus. Neo is, of course, his gaming name, and inspired by the main character in the movie The Matrix. Babson's actually his mother's maiden name, and Maximus was inspired by the main character in the movie Gladiator. While this is, of course, a huge legal change, Charlie doesn't really tell a lot of people about this, and it's not like he's trying to take on a new identity in his everyday life.

7:31Like I said, it's more of a way to have a unique name in the tennis world, and I have to imagine the gaming world as well. Charlie's father says this is who his son is. When Charlie becomes passionate about something or he has a goal, he's laser-focused to make it happen. Just as video games consumed him in high school, in college his life now seems to revolve more around tennis. He was even thinking of traveling to get a higher level of training than what was offered at his university. But as Charlie's senior year at UMass Dartmouth commenced, his life suddenly went down a very different path.

8:08A few weeks after the semester begins, on Thursday, October 11, 2007, Charlie seems to be having a normal day. At 2pm, he meets up with a friend named Mason, and they practice playing tennis for about two hours. Mason says he didn't really notice anything out in the ordinary, and it seemed like a great practice, and really just a great day in general. Now, Charlie actually had two sets of plans that night. He was going to meet up with his sister Brittany for a few drinks. But he was especially excited because a member of the women's UMass Dartmouth tennis team invited him to a party that night as well.

8:46Charlie invites Mason to come along too. So that was the plan. They grab dinner at the campus cafeteria and then part ways to get ready for the party. Mason heads home and assumes Charlie does the same. Neither of them live on campus, so it's going to take some time for travel. Mason's about 30 minutes away, but Charlie's closer, about 15 minutes away in New Bedford. It's basically the next town over to the east. But before they could meet back up on campus at 8.30 to go to the party together as planned, Charlie's sister Brittany notices something odd. It looks like Charlie deleted his entire Facebook page.

9:27And this is a huge thing for Brittany. She says that this is mainly how she and Charlie communicated. So when she went to go send her brother a message and saw that his entire page was gone, she was very confused and immediately called him. At first, the conversation seemed pretty normal. Brittany asks what he's up to, and Charlie says that he's walking, thinking about going to a party. But when Brittany asks him why he deleted his Facebook account, the tone of everything kind of shifts. In her interview with Disappeared, she says that in this moment when she asks about the Facebook account, she can just hear his heart dropping.

10:07And then all of a sudden he gets really scared. He says he has no idea what happened to his Facebook account. Brittany says that at this point, it's clear that Charlie becomes extremely panicked. He's talking really fast and saying that very important people were after him. he doesn't give a lot of detail but he does say that he sent some emails to these important people and he isn't safe and neither is britney now britney's actually nearby in rhode island attending college herself and charlie tells her that she needs to leave school immediately and go home to their father so he can protect her before charlie ends the conversation he says something very cryptic, something that has left people stumped in this case for nearly two decades now.

11:00He says all the answers are in the periodic table of elements. Obviously, Brittany is extremely concerned and immediately calls her father and Charlie's father. At this point, she's crying. She has no idea what's going on, but Charlie is scaring her. But it turns out that Charlie had already called both of his parents, and unfortunately, both missed his call. But Charlie did leave them voicemails. In both the voicemail to his mom and to his dad, it sounds like Charlie is running. In the message for his dad, he discusses going south to Florida and then entering Mexico. But in the message he left for his mom, he talks about going to Texas.

11:50He also mentions that he needs to be loved more, and that he felt isolated before the voicemail ends abruptly. So, of course, his parents and his sister try to call Charlie back, but his phone appeared to be turned off and was going straight to voicemail. Meanwhile, by the time 8.30pm rolls around, Charlie's friend Mason is waiting in the parking lot on campus for him. He waits for about 45 minutes, trying to call Charlie as well but only getting his voicemail. Eventually, he just leaves, figuring Charlie went to the party without him. When Charlie's family still can't get in touch with him the following day, they report him missing.

12:33Now, from what I could find, there doesn't really appear to be any search for Charlie early on. It's kind of a be-on-the-lookout type of situation versus a full-on search. But by Sunday, so three days after Charlie goes missing, the Dartmouth police get a call about a backpack found at a nearby home on Slocum Road. After going through the contents, they confirm that it is Charlie's backpack. Of course, this does give us some clues, though. This area is about three miles east of campus, and in between campus and Charlie's home in New Bedford. This really does seem to be what amps up the investigation.

13:11Charlie isn't just a 22-year-old with senioritis trying to skip a few classes. He was an overachiever who was considering medical school. And finding his backpack abandoned on a possible route home was a huge red flag that something could be seriously wrong. They act on this immediately, and bring in dogs in hopes of tracking Charlie's scent. But they don't find anything. Now, once Charlie's parents realized that he'd gone missing, they called the school to ask them to look for his blue 1999 Ford Expedition because he'd been staying in it and they end up finding it parked on campus the same day that they find the backpack.

13:53If you watched the episode of Disappeared about Charlie's case they really dramatize this part. They act like it's a big shock that Charlie may have been sleeping in his car and they even kind of leave the viewer wondering who may have been sleeping in his vehicle. but according to an interview Charlie's father gave to Tamra Sikarsik with WJAR News in 2022, Charlie's parents knew he was staying in his car. It's never explained in the show or in any reporting that I could find as to why Charlie was staying in his car but it's clear through quotes that his parents were aware of this fact. Either way, wherever Charlie was headed, for some reason, he decided to go on foot.

14:36At this point, his disappearance feels like it's getting stranger by the minute. And just the next day, investigators would make another major discovery about Charlie's whereabouts after he last spoke with his family. When Detective Robert Levinson from the Dartmouth PD is back in the office on Monday, he's discussing Charlie's case with another officer, when that officer suggests that Charlie sounds a lot like a suspect he was looking for in another case. BJ's Wholesale Club makes holiday hosting so easy, we called in Thanksgiving's original host to talk about it. Pilgrim here. We could have used BJ's back in the day.

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16:37At about 3am on Friday the 12th, so really just hours after Charlie speaks with his sister and leaves his parents those voicemails, a woman named Jean, who lives a few miles south of campus, calls the police to tell them that a shirtless man just broke into her home through a second story window. And that man did match Charlie's description. Now, the woman explains that this man wasn't really threatening. He actually just seemed super confused. He kind of just keeps saying, excuse me ma 'am, I was just leaving. I was looking for my friend, Mason. Then he just leaves out the same window and runs into the nearby woods.

17:19Overall, Gene described him as being very polite. Now, between this guy just looking like Charlie, his clothing matching the description of when he was last seen, and saying he was looking for his friend Mason, the same name of the friend Charlie actually had plans with that night, Detective Levinson is sure that Charlie is the man who broke into Gene's home. And this is only further solidified when three days later, on October 18th, Charlie's sneakers are found in the woods nearby. This launches a massive search for Charlie. I mean, at this point, he has no shirt and no shoes. They assume he couldn't have gotten far.

18:00They bring in search teams, aerial support, but they don't find Charlie or anything else they believe belong to him. After physically searching for Charlie, they of course want to search his laptop. He spent so much of his life online, he was talking about these emails he sent to these very important people, surely there was something there. But his history was deleted, as were all his recent emails. Basically, everything from about a week before Charlie went missing is just gone. So if Charlie did send emails to important people that put his life in danger, they were never recovered from his computer.

18:42And it's clear that whatever was on that computer or in his email, Charlie or someone didn't want people to see. Now, despite finding next to nothing on this laptop, they somehow were able to find one of the last websites that Charlie looked at, and that was for the University of Texas, which would obviously correlate with the voicemail that he left his mom. But when they dug into it, they found that Charlie never applied to the university, and they didn't find anything else related to possibly moving to Texas or anywhere else. I think his sister Brittany really put it best. Charlie was someone who had an entire life online, on that computer, and they found nothing.

19:31Like I said earlier, Charlie's disappearance feels like it's getting increasingly odd with each discovery. his car being left on campus, his backpack found to the east, and now we know that Charlie was also to the south at this woman's home looking for his friend Mason, who lives 30 minutes away. And Mason does confirm that Charlie knew where he lived. So this type of mistake, if it was a mistake, was extremely concerning and confusing to everyone. Of course, Charlie's loved ones and investigators are also concerned about his mental health. Not long before classes started, Charlie was briefly hospitalized for bipolar, and ultimately got off his medication completely.

20:17Now, his family did support him through this. His sister Brittany explained that when Charlie was first put on medication in high school, he really just didn't like how numb it made him feel. She said he wasn't happy or sad. And she remembers an incident where she was hysterical and she leaned on Charlie for support. And in turn, Charlie said that he was jealous that she could just feel intense emotions like that. When he finally got off his medication, he told Brittany that he didn't feel like he was alive before. But now, it feels like he's living for the first time. This probably goes without saying, but I'm not here to give medical advice.

20:56or do anything but try to understand Charlie's mindset as it may relate to his disappearance. And I obviously think this could be extremely relevant, as do the authorities and his family. While they were with Charlie through a lot of his ups and downs, they'd never seen him act like this. He'd never just disappeared, he'd never discussed running from people, and he'd never lost touch with reality. So while Charlie did struggle with his mental health, an incident like this just has never happened before. His mom, Anne, adds to this. She says that she saw Charlie a few days before he went missing, and she can usually tell when he's escalating into a manic state.

21:40He'd begin talking faster, his ideas would get more grand, but she didn't see any indication of that at all, and his friend Mason says the same. He'd seen Charlie at least twice a week, and didn't know that he even suffered from any mental health-related issues. And I do really want to emphasize that here, because Charlie's sister Brittany, the one he was extremely close with before going missing, has discussed this in several interviews. Basically, just like any other person in the world, Charlie was much more complex than what he was diagnosed with. And she emphasizes how she'd never seen behavior like this in her brother before.

22:17and both she and their mother Anne believe that Charlie was not hallucinating when he said someone was after him. Could Charlie have suffered a major mental break? Absolutely. It's entirely possible. I think we all know that someone that you think could be perfectly fine could be struggling greatly with their mental health without you ever knowing it. I'm not denying that. but his loved one's observations are valid and worth considering. Of course, investigators take all of this into consideration. Charlie changing his name, stopping his medication, his hospital stay, and now the factors of his disappearance.

23:00They do look into the possibility that someone may have actually been after him, but they didn't find any evidence of that. He was a young, well-liked college student with no enemies is outside of the people he fought against online and video games. Which, yes, is a theory I looked into in Charlie's case. While I was scouring his family's Facebook page for him, I found just one little comment about a gamer who was apparently caught cheating in Half-Life. After that, they went to the US shortly before Charlie went missing. Again, just a one-off comment that I tried to explore. I dug deep trying to get more information on this, and I did find some gamers who were caught cheating in Half-Life around this time, but none that led me back to Charlie.

23:50This is all that really happens in the first year that Charlie goes missing. In October 2008, the weekend leading up to the one-year mark of him being gone, there was another massive search for Charlie around UMass Dartmouth. Volunteers even prepped the day before for a line search across four square miles around the university. It also encompassed both where his shoes and his backpack were found. Over 200 volunteers, along with officials from the Bristol County Sheriff's Office, the Red Cross, and four PI agencies aided in this search. They do end up finding bones, and for about 24 hours, Charlie's family is put through absolute anguish as they wait to find out if they were Charlie's.

24:38In the end, they were just deer bones. And while this search didn't produce anything of value for Charlie's case, it did leave his family relieved and meant that Charlie could still be out there alive somewhere. And this hope is only amplified when, about a year later, a man in New Bedford calls police to report that a man matching Charlie's description knocked on his door at about 4am. He was asking for help getting back to SMU. Now, that stands for Southeastern Massachusetts University, which is what UMass Dartmouth used to be called over a decade prior to Charlie attending. But the man who answered the door assumes that this is just some type of trick.

25:22Maybe Charlie has come to the door to entice him to come outside, or perhaps to come inside his home for some type of invasion. So he takes the safe route, he closes the door, and calls police. And by the time the police get there, the man is gone. Now, when all this was happening, this man or his wife who was there for this incident had never heard of Charlie's case before. But once they saw a picture of Charlie, they are sure that that is the young man who was at their door that night, but officially that's never been confirmed. And Charlie's case sits for a long time. Around 2018, there was another search for Charlie after some land around campus became more accessible, but he wasn't there either.

26:08A few years later in 2021, a partial human skull was found on Dartmouth Beach. Someone was just walking by and saw it in the sand. The medical examiner said that it likely belonged to a young male, but testing wasn't able to confirm or rule out that it belongs to Charlie. Then the year after, in June 2022, Charlie's mom Anne passed away, never knowing what happened to her son. In the end, Charlie's cell phone, keys, and wallet have never been recovered, and his accounts were never accessed after he went missing. Charlie's dad even kept his phone and bank accounts active for years, hoping one day he'd see some activity.

26:52Investigators say that there is no video, no witnesses, and no evidence of foul play in this case.