Helping Hand
“My boss has four children. When they were younger, she was driving along when her van broke down on the side of a motorway. She pulled over onto the hard shoulder and put on her hazard lights. She got the kids out of the car and took them to stand behind the barrier. She called roadside assistance and her husband. All standard stuff.
About 10 or 20 minutes later, a car pulls up behind her with a rather good looking chap in it. He says he lives just off the next exit and had seen her, so he decided to circle back to see if she needed any help. All the way through this interaction, my boss says he didn’t throw up any red flags. He just seemed genuinely concerned about the kids being on the side of the road.
He offered to take her back to his place for a cup of tea while they waited. He even said she could call her husband to tell him where she was, just to be safe. Again, my boss is very sweet and kind and thinks the best of people, and there were still no red flags. Nevertheless, she turns him down only because she had four kids with her.
She said if she had been on her own, she probably would have taken him up on the offer since he seemed so genuinely kind. She turned him down because she didn’t want to take the children back to a stranger’s house, not because of mistrust. He sort of pushed it a little bit more but eventually shrugged and left the scene.
A couple of weeks later, she saw his photo in the paper. Apparently, he had stopped to help another woman whose car had also broken down, and he had attacked her and taken her life after offering her a lift. To this day, she maintains that she genuinely didn’t see any red flags when she spoke to him. She insists that the only reason she’s alive is because of her kids.”