Mistaken for a Monster

By M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
In July of 2018, Brad Jackson, 65, was found brutally murdered inside the business he managed. Pankaj Bhasin, 34, was accused of killing Jackson. He claimed that he had stabbed the man because he thought that Jackson was a werewolf. 

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Brad Jackson was killed in July 2018 by a man who claims that he thought that Jackson was a werewolf.

On July 13, 2018 a woman driving her Mercedes Benz in Old Alexandria, Virginia was shocked when a bloody, naked man opened the back passenger-side door, and jumped into the backseat. She yelled at him to get out of the car and then she did the smart thing, which was to get her daughter and herself out of the vehicle they kept locked until police arrived.

Police then found Jackson's body inside Window Universe, the business he managed. Police said Bhasin stabbed Jackson numerous times with a box cutter, and also used a dry-erase marker in the attack. The marker's cap was found embedded in the victim's body, police said. The rest of the marker was found in the Mercedes with Bhasin. A medical examiner found the case of death to be multiple blunt force and sharp force injuries. He had been stabbed over 50 times.

Bhasin's defense attorneys asked jurors to believe their client was not guilty by reason of insanity. Prior to the murder, Bhasin who lived in New Jersey had shown signs of severe mental illness, and had recently checked out of a psychiatric hospital. His attorneys described that he had attacked his own family. He suffered from bipolar disorder, and had a complete psychotic breakdown, which is why he thought that Brad Jackson was a werewolf. There was no connection between the two men, and the attack appeared to be completely random. The judge has overruled the motion to strike down the case.

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Pankaj Bhasin

In March, 2019 a judge declared a mistrial, since jurors were deadlocked in the murder case against Pankaj Bhasin. He ended up being institutionalized for three years in a Northern Virginia asylum, and was to transition into society in 2022.

Six months after his release in June, 2022, prosecutors discovered Bhasin had posted a profile on Facebook, where he described himself as an "easy-going adventurer" who had been traveling for two years. The fear was the he would deceive women combing through profiles, unaware he had killed a man.

A judge determined he could no longer use social media except for a Linkedin account. Bhasin was to live with his parents. He was required to take medication, wear a GPS monitor and get visits from mental health workers.

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Ekaterina Tirskaya thought she was a vampire & attacked her new lover claiming that he was a werewolf

Unfortunately this is not the first person to have been attacked by another person who thought they were a werewolf.

In November 2018, Ekaterina Tirskaya, 22, from Novosibirsk, Russia stood trial for stabbing her new lover claiming she thought he was a werewolf.

She had met this man on social media, and after becoming lovers she told him that she was a vampire, and like the character Elena Gilbert from the series The Vampire Diaries, she had a mission to kill werewolves. He told her that he didn't believe in the supernatural, and possibly suspecting that they had less in common than he originally thought he urged her to go home. What she did instead was go to the kitchen, get a knife and try to stab him when he stepped out of the shower. He managed to wrestle the knife away from, but she grabbed another and then stabbed him in the chest. He ran to a neighbor seeking help from the wannabe Van Helsing that had just tried to kill him.

Ahead of her trial in Siberia she was given a psychological assessment, and found to be sane. She was convicted to two and a half years in prison, and to pay her victim $5,000 in physical and emotional damages. He told local Russian newspapers that after losing his job, and seeing a therapist he still has nightmare about the blonde "vampire" he met on the internet.

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The line between reality and fantasy is very thin for some persons

In 2023, a TikTok user claimed her mother believed she was a werewolf. Her mother was an addict who took  her every week to the zoo to visit with "her family". Her mother referred to her as a pup, decorated the walls with forest-themed wallpaper so she could feel "at home", wore fake fangs and referred to her hands as paws.

When she was about 8 years old, she ceased contact with her mother, and went to live with her father's family. She didn't hear from her mother until she was in high school.

She learned from her maternal grandparents, her mother was admitted to an asylum after she bit several people, in some cases so severely they became infected.

Once she released she became engaged to a man who believed he was a dragon.

​So how thin is that line between fantasy and reality?

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