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July 14, 2021 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
36:16
Edition 557 - Philip Jett

A slightly shorter edition - with Philip Jett in Nashville who tells the chilling story of the kidnapping of the International President of oil giant Exxon in 1992 - and the unlikely duo later brought to justice for the crime...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I hope that life is treating you reasonably well and I hope that you are feeling that the ending effectively of COVID restrictions in the well I'm not going to say the United Kingdom because that does not apply in Scotland or Wales in the same way.
In England on the 19th of July, I hope that you're encouraged by that.
We have to wait and see what's happening because case numbers as reported are going up.
So we are, I think, going to be the only country in the world that has lifted restrictions when case numbers were going up.
But you have to play against that, the fact that we have a very successful vaccination program.
I've now had both of mine.
I think we've just got to see how it goes, really.
I'm still pleased to see that face mask wearing is going to be required on public transport in London, which I think is a good thing, reassuring.
I know opinions differ on that.
Please don't send me loads of emails about it.
You know, it reassures me, so please leave me with that.
But anyway, that's what's going to be happening here.
Frankly, I will be happy when we don't have to talk about or think about or contemplate COVID anymore because I've had it with it.
And the disaster that it's meant in so many lives, including the small disaster it's wreaked upon my life too, maybe it's affected you in many ways.
I'm sure it has.
There isn't an unscathed person in this world from this.
Now, what are we going to do on this edition of The Unexplained?
I'm going to bring you a conversation that I did for another radio show a little while ago.
And I've got a number of recordings, conversations, material, good interviews, I think, you can tell me, that I think need to be put here on the podcast for posterity.
This is one of them.
Now, it is a little peripheral to the unexplained, but it's an astonishing story.
And maybe it's one to put out during the summertime when you might have some spare time.
You want to hear a good story.
It's a very sad story, I have to say.
It is about a famous kidnapping that I think a lot of people have forgotten, which is a shame.
It's an astonishing story.
It's a very sad personal story for the person who was kidnapped.
Let me tell you what it is.
You may recall when I tell you.
It was 1992.
Exxon International President Sidney Ressso left his home for the office.
He stepped out to pick up the paper at the end of his drive, like he did every morning.
A van screeched to a stop, and a big man in a ski mask with a pistol leapt from the vehicle, grabbed him, shoved him into the back of the van.
That is the beginning of the kidnap story.
The story of the people who did this and what happened and how it happened has been told by Philip Jett.
And I think it's worth hearing here.
So we're going to bring you that conversation, which I think it's probable you won't have heard before here on this edition of The Unexplained.
And let me know what you think about that.
As for guest suggestions, if you have any, they would be gratefully received.
People core to the unexplained, ghost stories, time slips, all of that stuff, always looking for those things.
Any of the topics, the panoply of topics, if that's the word that we cover here, go to my website, theunexplained.tv, created by Adam from Creative Hotspot.
And you follow the link.
You can send me an email from there and put in the subject line guest suggestion.
And I'll get on it.
I do.
I will add it to the list and we'll see where we go with it.
Guest suggestions, always gratefully received.
Thank you for all of your comments.
They're always gratefully received too.
Always good to hear from listeners like Shirley in Canada, Melanie in Maine, Danny in the UK, and you if you've emailed recently.
Please know that if your email requires a response, it will get one.
And if it hasn't got one and has required a response, please let me know and I'll make that right.
Okay, let's get to my conversation with Philip Jett, and his book is called The Taking of Mr. Rexon.
It is the story of a nasty kidnapping.
But it is a remarkable story, and it's one that happened not in the 1970s, in the era of the Symbionese Liberation Army and Patty Hearst and hijacking aeroplanes and that sort of thing.
This happened in the 1990s, and yet a lot of us have forgotten about this.
Philip Jett hasn't.
He's written a book about it called The Taking of Mr. Exxon.
If you can imagine one of the most senior executives of a corporation in the world being grabbed and being abducted in broad daylight, more or less, that's the story we're about to unfold.
But the way that it unfolded and the motivations of the people behind it, I think, are pretty gripping and shocking in equal measure.
In Nashville, Tennessee, Philip Jett is online.
Philip, thank you very much for doing this.
Oh, thank you, Howard.
It's great to be here.
You know, I'm not sure how foot sure that introduction was.
You can tell me.
No, that's spot on.
Although I'm not sure I'm that interesting of a person, but it is an interesting book.
Well, gee, I think you are.
I mean, your biography says former corporate attorney represented corporations and CEOs and celebrities.
What celebrities did you represent?
Are you allowed to name them?
No, I'm not allowed, but being in Nashville, I represented many country music stars and a couple actors and some sports figures.
So I had my share.
I was fortunate and now writing is my second career.
Right.
Well, this certainly came to my attention because the best stories are the ones that are almost avalanched, buried by history, and they get forgotten.
And this is one of those stories, isn't it?
It is.
I've not been writing very long, and I decided when I started writing, I wanted to write about things that had not been written about.
And so my first book came out, oh, about four years ago, and it was about the kidnapping of Adolph Coors III of the Coors Brewery out in Colorado.
No one had ever written that story.
Now, this story, no one has ever written about it either.
And I can't believe it because both are huge, huge kidnappings here in the U.S. and really around the world.
As you said, the president of Exxon, it doesn't get much bigger than that.
And it had, unlike a lot of kidnappings where a resolution is found or the perpetrators are caught give themselves away and the whole thing ends very badly for them.
And of course, they both ended up in jail.
We'll talk about that.
This did not end well for the principal, did it?
This is a very sad story.
It did not end well, no, for anyone.
And I tell people when I speak, I said, you know, particularly in this day and age, but as well in 1992 when this occurred, it's easy to take someone.
It's easy to snatch someone.
That's the easy part.
The difficult part is making the exchange in this day and age of technology and, you know, super planes and super helicopters and all this kind of stuff we have.
So it typically does not go well for either party, unfortunately.
It makes you wonder, and it's always made me wonder when I've thought about kidnapping, notorious kidnapping cases of our time, what it is that motivates anybody, be they a group, be they be a couple, be they be somebody acting alone, to want to do something like this.
Yes, usually it's desperation.
That was the case here, you know, and I will give a little away.
The kidnappers initially posed as environmental terrorists.
This was three years after the Exxon Valdez had run ashore in Alaska, and a lot of people were upset about that Greenpeace and what have you.
And so these kidnappers posed as environmental terrorists, but in actuality, they were desperate for money.
Which is, you know, a common enough motivation for doing these things.
Right.
But, you know, you have to be pretty steely to be able to carry something like this off.
And your chances of succeeding, if you can call that success, and getting the money and getting the person safely returned are slim in every case.
And yet when people do these things, they seem not to be, or they seem to blind themselves of that simple fact.
That's correct.
What I've, having written two books on the subject, in both cases, the kidnappers were, you know, I would almost say psychopaths, but they believe themselves smarter than law enforcement, you know, FBI.
They always consider themselves smarter, that they can do it better and will commit the perfect kidnapping.
We'll get into this in a little while.
We want to talk about the person who was kidnapped first, but just to say that I got the impression that the pair behind this kidnapping saw themselves as Bonnie and Clyde.
Yes, you know, and I think that's a good analogy because the man involved was the mastermind, so to speak.
And the woman involved just went along.
You know, she was more than happy to receive the money and all the things that that would bring them.
But if she had not been associated with this gentleman, she would not have done it.
Right.
And there's another story that's as old as the hills.
Just remember these names, Arthur and Irene Seale.
We'll get back to them in a little while.
Let's talk about Sidney Ressso, one of the most powerful men in 1992 on the planet.
If you're the president of Exxon and you'd worked there for 35 years and your nickname is Mr. Exxon, it doesn't get much more powerful than that.
Yeah, you know, there's someone that your parents would be proud of, you know.
This Mr. Riso, he had gone to a college in Louisiana, LSU we call it here, and received a degree in petroleum engineering and just started as, you know, just a kid working for Exxon at that time and was given, you know, he was given one of those projects out in the middle of the Texas that was a dry oil well, and he did good on it.
He showed that he could actually get oil out of, you know, dirt and sand.
So he worked his way up for 35 years, you know, and was transferred all around the world in some pretty dangerous places in which, you know, they have, it's much like the U.S. president here.
For an executive of his stature, they have these armored cars and these security agents and all that sort of thing.
But then later in his life, he returns to the U.S. and lives in a very nice subdivision of homes near New York City and felt safe.
You know, he was back in the U.S. Right.
And, you know, to all intents and purposes, he should have felt safe, were it not for the fact that somebody saw the value in him as a target.
That's right.
That's right.
And these kidnappers, they wanted money.
They wanted a lot of money.
It wasn't just a little money to pay the bills.
They wanted lots of money.
In this case, they wanted $18.5 million, which was the largest ransom ever asked for.
And today that would equate to about $34 million.
So that's a lot of money.
That was a staggering amount in 1992, and it's still a staggering amount today.
Yes.
And so they had a short list of corporate executives that could bring them that.
And they looked at AT ⁇ T, Merck.
They went down the line.
And it's funny, you mentioned the 1970s, and that was one reason they chose Exxon, because in 1973, I believe it was, Exxon paid several million to obtain the release of a manager down in South America.
So the kidnappers knew that Exxon had paid a great deal of money before.
So that's why they chose Exxon.
But did they not realize, and we'll have to get into talking about them in just a second, obviously, but did they not realize, as people would realize, that from my memory, the world changed.
The willingness of companies to pay off people who kidnapped their executives or did things or hijacked their corporate planes or whatever they did, the willingness to do that was much reduced because, you know, the general view was that crime should not be made to pay and you cannot reward these people.
You have to resist them.
That's true.
And, you know, more than that, you can still kidnap in foreign countries.
There are some countries that kidnapping is a business.
And, you know, having written two books, you know, I've become friends with former FBI agents and even a director.
And they tell me all these stories.
And, you know, what I found interesting, and this is a little aside, that even today in countries, there's kidnappings, but they usually ask for 10, 15,000.
It's just a quick turnaround.
They don't mean to harm anyone.
They just grab somebody, say, and it's kind of a cost of doing business.
In this case, this is big money, and it's in the United States.
It's not in a foreign, it's not in South America, the Middle East, you know, wherever.
And so the kidnappers were, you know, they were living in the past, as you say.
I mean, they had not considered technology and law enforcement and just, as you say, the feeling about rewarding a kidnapper.
Right.
So enter Arthur and Irene Seal, the two kidnappers here.
He's a former police officer, had worked for Exxon in security.
They had fired him.
He thereby becomes a man with a grudge.
Right.
And it's funny, I interviewed Mr. Riso's secretary.
She was still living in New York City.
And she said she remembered Art Seal walking around the floor in the building, the same building they were in at the time.
So, yeah, he was, you know, he had a grudge because he was terminated.
And, you know, he was terminated really in his police job as well.
So he had not fared well in either of those cases.
Okay.
And what about Irene, the wife?
She was, you know, just, you know, and I hate to say this, it sounds sexist, but she was just a wife, you know, a mother.
And she just kind of went along with whatever he said in their lives.
He ran the household.
So whatever he said went.
More, you know, a conservative, traditional type of marriage.
So she was not any kind of mastermind or evil kidnapper type.
She was just this man's wife.
Is she a sympathetic character?
Should we feel sorry for her?
No.
No, I would not.
She was still greedy.
Because I can't imagine the conversation between the husband and wife.
You know, while we're kind of short of money here, let's pick an executive, pick a huge amount of money as a sum that we want for that executive and snatch them off the street.
That's true.
And in the book, and I mentioned a few of those because to give it away a little, she turned evidence against her husband and got a much reduced sentence.
And as part of that, she had a confession that was 32 pages long, single space type.
So I had a lot of information from their perspective.
And what I found was there would be arguments, you know, husband and wife arguments about the kidnapping, you know.
So you can imagine you're like, you know, you tell the wife to get out, make a phone call, a payphone, and they didn't do it correctly.
And you have a spat and you make her go back and make another phone call.
It's a sad situation, but in some cases, it was humorous.
Okay, so they formulated a plan.
What was their plan and how did they formulate it?
They did surveillance where Mr. Riso lived, and he lived in a posh neighborhood with like four acre lots, big homes, trees wooded, so that they conducted surveillance of that neighborhood.
And Saul went, one time he left home, and he was a creature of habit.
He had a corporate limousine and a guard supplied, but he chose not to use it because, as I say, he felt safe here in the U.S. Well, we have to say that this is New Jersey.
And New Jersey.
Knowing New Jersey as I know it, you know, you get on the ferry from New York, you cross over into New Jersey, you drive 10, 20 miles, and, you know, it's hometown America.
It's safer.
I thought it was.
It's not.
And it's funny because I've visited there and I visited the home, the street, and the neighborhood.
And it is.
It's like you're out in a rural area.
It's not major city.
It's not some kind of industrialized area.
It's a very nice rolling hills, beautiful area.
And so he's there.
And so they formulate this plan that, but first they have to gain surveillance on him.
And they notice that every day he leaves at the same time in the morning around 7.30 a.m.
He drives his own car.
He stops at the end of the driveway, picks up his newspaper, proceeds to work, which is about 10, 15 minutes away.
And they would do this surveillance.
They would pose as joggers.
So they would jog up and down the street just like, you know, and they had brand name jogging outfits that would fit the neighborhood and all that sort of thing.
And so their plan then was to rent a van and they built a box.
And I call it a homemade coffin because that's about the size of it.
It looks like a homemade coffin with latches and ropes and locks.
And they put that in the van and they would proceed to his house on several occasions and it had to be called off because something didn't go right.
But on the morning of the kidnapping, Mr. Riso Ate breakfast, said goodbye to his wife, drove to the end of his driveway and picked up the newspaper.
And in this case, one of the kidnappers had jogged by earlier that morning and kicked the newspaper over to the passenger side of the driveway so that Mr. Riso would have to stop, get out of the car, walk around, and pick up the newspaper rather than just scooping it up from the driver's side.
So when he did that, they were parked down the street.
They screeched to a halt.
The kidnapper, the male kidnapper, big guy, about 6'2 ⁇ , 210, 220, jumps out, mask on, gloves, 45-caliber gun, big gun, and grabs Mr. Riso by the collar.
And Mr. Riso at that time was 57 years old, had had a heart attack three years earlier.
Not particularly healthy guy anyway.
So he could have died there and then.
Yeah.
And so he grabs him by the collar, throws him in the back of the van, and the woman is driving, the wife, and he tells him to get into this box.
Well, they struggle, and he shoots Mr. Riso in the arm with his.45 caliber gun.
And it's not just a flesh wound.
It enters his wrist, travels up his forearm, and then blasts his elbow out as it proceeds out.
So it's a significant wound.
So he cuffs him.
And what's really cruel here, he cuffs his arms behind his back, tapes his mouth, tapes his eyes shut, put him in this box, then has like lattice roping over him.
So he pins him down into the box so he can't move around, shuts the lid, and then they take him 30 minutes away to a self-storage unit that's not temperature controlled, and they leave him there.
So Sidney Ressso, president of Exxon, been there for 35 years.
They kidnap him from his driveway in New Jersey, and they shoot him, causing him an injury, a severe one, and then they put him in a not-temperature controlled storage unit.
What happens then?
They write up a ransom note and they send it to the Riso family.
And until that moment, let's say, let me back up, for a day, the authorities did not know what happened.
And their initial thought, as most FBI agents tell me, is you generally think that perhaps, in this case, Mr. Riso left voluntarily.
Maybe he had had enough of corporate America, enough stress in his life, had lots of money, had a young girlfriend, and just took off.
So they thought he might have quit the rat race.
Yeah, yeah.
And that was their first idea that they had to check out.
And Mr. Riso was an extraordinarily good guy.
I mean, no one deserves what happens here, but he was an extraordinarily good guy from everything I've learned.
He was a family man, a religious man.
He gave back to the community.
He was also an environmentalist, which was rare at Exxon.
And he loved his family.
He had five children.
Four were living at that time.
And so they did away with that theory immediately.
And then the next theory was that because he'd had a heart attack, perhaps he'd had a medical emergency and either was taken to a hospital or was lost in the neighborhood somewhere.
So they have to take this one thing at a time.
They don't jump immediately to something nefarious, although they expect that might be the case.
They go ahead and deal with these other issues first.
And then by the end of the day, they expect that he's probably been taken.
And it was the next day when the ransom note arrived asking for $18.5 million and used $100 bills.
So there was a bit of a delay in actually in realizing this.
And of course, then receiving the ransom note and realizing that this was a kidnapping.
There was 24 hours.
That's right.
And the FBI was involved immediately.
You know, here in the U.S., typically the case is the FBI stays out of a case for 24 hours because the person may reappear for whatever reason.
And they don't want to use their resources unnecessarily.
Here, because he is the president of Exxon, they jump in right away.
And what the kidnappers had intended to do, they intended to leave a ransom note on the driveway or in the car.
But because there was a struggle with Mr. Riso, the kidnapper forgot to do that.
And so there was the one day delay where the kidnappers sent the ransom note.
And in the meantime, injured Sidney Riso is in this storage unit where there isn't a lot of space, where there isn't a lot of air.
That's right.
And I mentioned this in the book that, and you've mentioned it earlier.
I mean, he goes from being one of the most important corporate executives in the world.
And within half an hour, he is now in this box, in a storage unit.
His eyes are taped, his mouth is taped, his hands are cuffed.
He's hurt.
He doesn't know where he is.
He's, you know, probably is in shock.
And you described our art seal and Irene Seal.
You called them psychopaths.
For them not to have any feeling for this man kind of indicates that, doesn't it?
Very, very strongly.
It does, because they didn't take very good care of them.
You know, I don't know.
I can't give the clinical identity of what they're suffering from other than greed.
And, you know, but they didn't care.
They didn't take very good care of him.
They didn't feed him.
They gave him very little water.
They checked on him once, maybe twice a day, but usually just once a day, and said that they would open the box and let him sit up.
And that was it.
And, you know, I've thought, not that I would do this, but if I kidnap someone for $18.5 million, I'm going to be very nice to him and taking great care of him.
But that was not the case.
And, you know, the authorities and the courts later viewed that in their sentencing because they saw that these people did not really care how Mr. Riso suffered.
It's a terrible story.
How were the, I mean, look, he subsequently perishes in this terrible environment.
He dies, doesn't he?
He does.
He does.
But that doesn't stop them.
They dispose of the body and then continue on with the farce of we have Mr. Riso.
We want the money.
So obviously they pretend he's alive and they want the $18 million.
They do.
They do.
This didn't change anything.
And, you know, even worse, they made Mrs. Riso go on television at least once, maybe twice, I can't recall exactly, and more or less plead for his life.
And this is after he's already dead.
How absolutely heartless, disgusting, and terrible.
How were they caught in the end then?
How were police able to get them?
Well, you know, and this goes back to what I was saying.
It's easy to snatch someone.
It's difficult to make the exchange.
They want this $18.5 million and it weighs, they want it in 10, this is sort of humorous.
It was for the FBI because they were called the yuppie kidnappers because they drove an old Mercedes and they wanted the ransom placed in Eddie Bauer sports bags.
Most kidnappers don't specify, especially Eddie Bauer.
So they wanted 10 bags full of money.
Well, that weighed 400 pounds.
And as you say in the book, the height of that stack of bags of money was 66 feet high.
Yes.
This is a lot of money.
It's just not something you can grab and run.
You know, this is a major haul.
And so they were thinking in terms of like, you know, old gangster days almost, not anything.
So the plan was that they would have Mrs. Riso and a couple other family members drop the money at a train station, load the money on a train, get on board, and then toss money out, be on a cell phone, toss money out at specified locations where they would pick, the kidnappers would pick up the money.
Well, it never got to that point because in this little community, there were over 300 FBI agents plus local law enforcement, plus special helicopters and planes with infrared and everything else, you know, sound, audio equipment.
But it did take almost four hours that night before they were apprehended, and they were apprehended.
And what about the subsequent trial?
I mean, the evidence against them, pretty damning.
You know, what sorts of pleas were made on their behalf, if there could be any, in the trial?
Well, there wasn't really.
And particularly what happened here was once they were apprehended, they still didn't speak for a week.
So they had the kidnappers, but they wouldn't talk.
And so you have the situation, especially with the Riso family, of, okay, we have kidnappers, but we don't have Mr. Riso.
And they're not telling us where he is.
So there's no indication that he's, you know, they don't come clean on the fact that they've killed the poll.
And in fact, they thought possibly there were more kidnappers that held him.
And these were just two of them.
Right.
So the cops obviously thought maybe these people are the tip of an iceberg.
Yeah, exactly.
And they were expecting the kidnappers to make contact and say, look, we'll give you Mr. Riso, but you give us these people back and give us the money.
They expected it to continue, but it didn't.
And so they came to realize that most likely he's dead.
And so they were able to get Irene Seal's mother to speak to her and get her to cooperate.
And she with her lawyer cut a deal.
I think she ended up serving 17 years for this.
And her husband is still in prison.
I think he got 95 years, didn't he?
He did.
He got life plus 95 because here you have federal law and you have state law.
And they piled up on him so that he could never see the light of day again.
The two of them are a heartless, cold couple.
She is out now and presumably has started some kind of new life?
She has.
And, you know, I don't mention that.
I gave them some privacy in that respect.
I don't know why.
I just felt I should.
And have either of them, he's behind bars and will be for the rest of his natural life.
She is out because she turned, you know, evidence.
She did.
That's right.
Have either of them expressed anything that would approximate to remorse?
Not that I've read, no.
I think he, you know, he has indicated remorse and that he has found Christianity and, you know, the typical prison kind of thing.
But whether he's sincere or not, I have no idea.
But with the people that I speak with in law enforcement, they don't believe that he's capable of remorse, that it's just something that he says.
And so I can't say for sure whether he's sincere or not.
So this is, I guess writing this then for you, and you can tell me whether this is anywhere near the mark, is kind of a warning from history that there will always be people like that, unempathetic people who think that they can try a crime.
And we just have to be mindful of the fact that even though it's 2021, these things happen and they happened in 1992 when they weren't expected.
My thoughts and feelings go out to Sidney Resso's family?
Yeah, you know, and also to the kidnappers' family.
I mean, and I mentioned this in the book.
I mean, the kidnappers had two children at home, and they had mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters, and, you know, and they had the shame of this happening.
So both families were torn apart by this.
And to your, you know, and I do end the book with that too bad that the SEALs didn't realize that this is, you know, this was 1992 with technology and this was not going to pay off.
And what's interesting with my first book on Coors and this one on Exxon, corporate security people have reached out to me quite often and used, actually they use my books as teaching tools to show this is what happens when an executive is not paying close attention or doesn't take, make use of security measures.
And so they, unfortunately, Coors and Riso were two examples of executives where that was going to be my last question, really, and you kind of answered it.
You know, poor Mr. Riso, we've lost him, but we can learn lessons from this.
And presumably corporate America has taken on board the lessons from this case.
And it's funny because, you know, Riso was the case where corporate security did go to a different level.
That was the case, you know, before you were talking about the 70s and a lot of things were made differently changed.
But kidnappings in the U.S. were still viewed as so remote, especially of corporate executives, that nothing was done.
But RISO changed the game.
And now, regardless of whether you're out of the country or in the country, there is very tight security.
And, you know, and I've read some of the interesting security measures they have.
And it's like James Bond type stuff.
But how terribly sad that in 1992, a year that I remember very well, a man has to lose his life for corporate America to learn that lesson and impose security much tighter.
I mean, we have to say that, as you said, he refused a lot of the security that was offered to him.
And I guess attitudes around that have changed.
But what a story and what a terrible couple.
The book is called The Taking of Mr. Exxon, Philip.
And how's it doing sales-wise?
It's only just out, isn't it?
No, it's coming out.
Actually, it's coming out May 1st.
Okay, so it's not even out yet.
It can pre-order now, as they say, you know, at wherever books are sold.
But hopefully it will do well.
Well, you know, it's a warning from history, I think is the phrase that I used earlier.
And I'm sure they're going to make a TV, you know, documentary about this, too.
What a story.
Philip Jett, thank you very much for telling me it.
Well, thank you, Howard.
Philip Jett in Nashville, Tennessee, with a story of Sidney Ressso, the president of Exxon, who was kidnapped and sadly died, and the awful couple and their machinations and their plotting that ultimately got them behind bars.
What a story.
A chilling tale from the past.
Now, what, nearly 30 years ago, the taking of Mr. Exxon and Philip Jett.
A sad and disturbing story in many, many ways.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained, so until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online, and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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