"The Watcher": The Letters That Kept a Family From Ever Moving Into Their Dream House

In June 2014, a family bought the house of their dreams in a quiet, wealthy town in New Jersey.

Six bedrooms. A big front porch. A good school district. A street lined with old trees. They paid about one point three million dollars.

A few days later, before they had spent a single night there, a letter arrived. Typed. Addressed to the new owner.

It said the house was anxious for them to move in. It said the writer's family had been watching the house for decades. It asked about their children.

It was signed, "The Watcher."

That family never moved in. They sold the house five years later, at a loss.

And to this day, nobody knows who the Watcher is.

657 Boulevard

Westfield is a town of about thirty thousand people in central New Jersey, about forty minutes from New York City. It is the kind of place people move to for the schools, the parks and the sense of safety.

The house at 657 Boulevard is one of the nicer homes in town. A large, classic colonial-style house with six bedrooms, on a street called simply Boulevard.

In June 2014, Derek and Maria Broaddus bought it for one point three million dollars. They had three young children. The house needed some work, so they planned to renovate before moving in.

The first letter

Shortly after they closed on the house, and before they moved in, the first letter came.

It was typed and unsigned except for two words at the bottom: The Watcher. It misspelled the family's name.

The writer welcomed them to the neighborhood, in a way that made the welcome feel like a threat.

According to the excerpts that have been published, the letter said, "657 Boulevard is anxious for you to move in." It said the writer had been "in control" of the house "for the better part of two decades." It said the writer's family had watched over the house before that.

It suggested that "greed" had brought the last several families to the house, and had now brought the Broadduses.

And it asked about their children. The writer had seen them. The writer referred to the children as "young blood." One line read: "It has been years and years since the young blood ruled the hallways of the house."

The letter ended with a line that the family has said they could not stop thinking about.

"You know I will be watching."

More letters

The family went to the police immediately.

Over the following weeks, more letters arrived. In total, four letters signed by the Watcher are part of the public record.

Each was more disturbing than the last. They referred to the previous owners. They referred to the children again, and seemed to know details about the family. They described the house almost as if it were alive, and as if the writer had some kind of spiritual connection to it.

The letters seemed to know about the renovations. About the layout of the house. About the comings and goings at the property.

Whoever was writing them was paying close attention.

According to reporting on the letters, one asked which bedrooms the children would sleep in, saying, "I'll know as soon as you move in," and, "Then I can plan better." Another asked, "Will the young blood play in the basement?" And another said, "If you were upstairs you would never hear them scream."

A neighbor a few houses down also received a letter signed by the Watcher around the same time.

The family also learned something else. The previous owners, who had lived in the house for twenty-three years without any trouble, had received a letter from the Watcher themselves, a few days before they moved out. They said it was not threatening and that they threw it away. They had not mentioned it to the buyers. In 2015, the Broadduses sued them over it. The case was dismissed.

The Broadduses decided their children would not sleep in that house. They stopped going there with the kids. They never moved in.

The investigation

The Westfield Police Department investigated.

The first people they looked at were the neighbors. In particular, a longtime family living next door. The police found no evidence linking them to the letters, and they were cleared.

The family also hired a private investigator and a former FBI profiler. According to Derek Broaddus's later court testimony, the profiler concluded the Watcher was probably someone in their fifties or sixties who lived nearby. But no one was ever identified.

Then there was the DNA. Investigators were able to recover DNA from one of the envelopes. The results suggested that the person who licked or sealed it may have been a woman.

That was surprising. Many people had assumed the Watcher was a man.

But the DNA did not match anyone they tested. And without a match, it could not identify the writer.

It is also possible that whoever sealed the envelope was not the person who wrote the letters.

A town divided

When the story became public, Westfield was split.

Many people were horrified and sympathetic. A family's dream had been destroyed by an anonymous stalker.

But some people in town were skeptical. They wondered whether the letters were a hoax, or a story that had grown in the telling.

The Broadduses found themselves in an impossible position. They owned a house they could not live in. They were paying for it, along with the home they were actually living in. And the story made the house very hard to sell.

The sale

It took years. At one point, the family applied to tear the house down, split the lot in two, and build two new homes, which would have made the property easier to sell. In January 2017, the town's planning board unanimously rejected the plan.

In 2019, the Broadduses finally sold 657 Boulevard. The sale price was about nine hundred and fifty-nine thousand dollars. More than three hundred thousand dollars less than they had paid.

They had never spent a night there.

The new owners, a young couple, reportedly have not been contacted by the Watcher.

Hollywood

By then, the story had become famous.

A widely read magazine article in 2018 brought the case to national attention. Netflix won the rights to the story. In 2022, it released a drama series called The Watcher, starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale.

The series was loosely based on the real events. At the request of the real family, the characters were given a different name. The show also changed a lot of details and added dramatic plotlines that did not happen.

If you saw the show, keep in mind that much of what happens in it is fiction. The real story is simpler, and in some ways more unsettling, because it has no ending.

Who was the Watcher?

So who wrote the letters?

There are three broad possibilities.

The first is someone close by. A neighbor, or someone with a connection to the neighborhood. The letters seemed to show detailed knowledge of the house and the family's activities. Someone was watching, or at least claiming to. But the most obvious neighbors were investigated and cleared.

The second is someone with a connection to the house's history. The letters spoke about the writer's family watching the house for decades, and about past families. That suggests someone who knew, or claimed to know, the property's past. But nobody has ever been identified.

The third possibility is that the writer was someone with no real connection at all. Someone who saw a sale in the local real estate listings, picked a target, drove by a few times, and wrote letters designed to frighten. The fact that the Watcher apparently went quiet after the family stopped going to the house could fit that.

And then there is the DNA, which suggests a woman sealed at least one envelope. It may be the most important clue in the case. Or it may mean nothing at all.

What we still don't know

More than ten years later, no one has been charged. No one has been publicly identified. And as far as is publicly known, the letters stopped.

A family bought a house. They never lived in it. They lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And they spent years wondering whether someone on their street, or someone driving past, was watching their children.

The Watcher has never been found.

Who do you think wrote the letters? Someone in the neighborhood? Someone from the house's past? Or a stranger who just wanted to see what fear could do?