CRIME HUNTER: Did Craigslist sex hook-ups led to teen’s BDSM murder?

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Brooke Slocum was a gal in trouble.

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Just 18 years old and eight months pregnant, she and her boyfriend Charles Oppenneer, 25, were sleeping in their car in frigid Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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When it got too cold, the pretty teen would sell her body for sex on Craigslist and the pair would sleep in the motel room the john had just sprung for. The sex work was the boyfriend’s idea.

But even before she turned 18, Slocum used Craigslist to find men looking for sex.

“(She told me) just the basics, that Charlie took her and that she wasn’t proud of doing it, but she had to do what she had to do,” friend McKenzie Hallo told WWMT, adding that the boyfriend acted as her pimp.

In the dark world of sex work, the wrong John is always just around the corner. And that’s what happened in July 2014 when the couple met 31-year-old bondage enthusiast and gas company supervisor Brady Oestrike in a sex chat room.

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Oppenneer struck a special deal with Oestrike: He could have sex with the pregnant teen for money.

Oestrike wrote in a message to the pair: “I can swing $120. I’d like to [—-] outside in a park around 11:30 that ok?”

Slocum replied: “Hmmmm … I dunno I don’t wanna get in trouble for indecent exposure or anything.”

Oestrike reassures her: “It’s cop-free.”

The tryst was slated for July 12, 2014, at Gezon Park and it’s agreed that aspiring pimp Oppenneer would be present for the carnal capers. That would be the last time the young couple would be seen alive.

Oestrike came from a wealthy, religious family, and even spent part of his younger years performing missionary work for his church. As he got older, that changed and he withdrew into himself, developing a reputation as a loner.

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Behind his public face lay sickening ambitions.

“He told me he was having thoughts about killing me and he was warning me. He’s like, ‘These thoughts are happening to me,’” former roommate Rachel Morris told TrueCrime Daily.

And while the exterior of his home was neat, police photos from the interior revealed squalor. It was a home packed with a multitude of weapons and weird items like baby dolls and medieval armour. He had enough ammo to start the Third World War.

Days after the pair disappeared, Brooke’s father, Greg Slocum, reported his daughter missing. Thus began a desperate manhunt for the pair — and answers.

But on July 16, homicide detectives got their first indication of just how horrific things were about to get. Sitting under a tree in another part of town, the headless body of Charles Oppenneer was discovered. Brooke Slocum was nowhere to be found.

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Modern cops know the first port of call in the 21st century is the computer.

Investigators traced the couple’s internet activities on Craigslist to Oestrike. The beefy man was put under surveillance.

Behind the walls of a tidy suburban bungalow on a quiet street in Grand Rapids, evil and deprivation were being fertilized via one man’s sick imagination and monstrous fantasies.

But what the surveillance team didn’t know was that while a search warrant was being secured, Brooke Slocum was going through hell.

In the basement of Oestrike’s home, Slocum was in handcuffs with a chain wrapped around her neck. Her arms had been tethered to a pulley system that suspended her from the ceiling. He then repeatedly tortured and sexually assaulted the terrified teen, lovingly filming the whole twisted ordeal.

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And when he had enough, he strangled her to death.

Cops later released video of the torture and murder of Brooke Slocum showing Oestrike lovingly adjusting the chains, ropes and other bondage gear while laying out lingerie for his victim.

Her father later blamed the boyfriend.

“She did some pretty unspeakable things for him that she thought was out of love,” Greg Slocum said later. “That’s not love, that was manipulation.”

Before investigators could move on the sicko, he made the ghost cars on his street and led cops on a high-speed chase. In the trunk of the car was Slocum’s lifeless body.

After the chase ended with him crashing his car, Oestrike put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

“To think this was going to be my first granddaughter and to have lost her is just every nightmare come true,” said Greg Slocum. “I forgive Brady Oestrike for what he did, because it’s not for me to judge. We don’t know the conditions in his life that made him create such a terrible crime.”

As Bob Dylan said, “It might be the Devil or it might be the Lord” but Brady Oestrike is gonna have to serve somebody.

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@HunterTOSun

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