LISTEN: Everett dad says his daughter had been complaining about a monster outside her window, turned out she was right Your browser does not support the audio element.

Rick Heater thought his toddler was going through a phase. She was seeing monsters. Which was why he didn’t take it too seriously when she said she saw one outside her window.

But it wasn’t just a phase. Sometimes monsters are real.

“She would run into my room at night and tell me there was a monster outside,” Heater told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson. “So I’d just have her go to bed with me, not even thinking about it.”

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For about a month, his 3-year-old daughter slept in his room after seeing a monster outside the window at their Everett apartment.

“She would tell me sometimes it was a monster under her bed or a monster outside the window,” Heater said. “I just figured she was a 3-year-old seeing monsters. I did look out the window once or twice. Then I got a can of hairspray and put a label on it that said ‘monster repellent.’ And I’d spray it under her bed and act like I was spraying away the monsters.”

Outside the window

It was a man installing a security system who tipped Heater off to the real monster.

“He said, ‘You need to call the police,’” Heater said. “So I did. And while the police were on the way, he started pointed things out to me. Like chewing tobacco on the window, and cigarette butts outside the window, and a little fire pit that had been built outside the window.”

The scene was set in a 1.5 foot space between the apartment building and a rock wall. It’s not where many would expect someone to hang out.

“Me and the cop went out there together and looked at it,” Heater said. “The cop said, ‘This is extremely creepy.’”

“It’s sickening. It’s disgust. And it’s hatred,” he said. “I could name off a hundred emotions that I went through in a matter of minutes.”

Heater says that he taught his daughter to not talk with strangers, or open a door or window for anyone but her parents. That’s why she was coming into their room late at night.

“I asked my daughter to show me if she could open the window and she said, ‘Yeah, the man showed me like this,’” Heater said. “And she flipped the lock up on the window and slid it open.”

“The Marine in me says what I need to do is catch him and break his neck,” he said. “The law-abiding citizen in me says to let the police do their jobs.”

Open investigation

The police are currently investigating. A development in the case happened Wednesday night. Heater cannot say much as the investigation is ongoing, but that there was a bit of a chase and that they now have a pretty good description of the suspect. Heater assumes it’s a pedophile. The way the man set up outside the window appeared as if he wanted to hang out there for a while.

“When we were kids, we had seen monsters,” Heater said. “But they were fake. They weren’t real monsters. When our kid told us she was seeing monsters, we thought it was a normal phase … it’s extremely creepy to find out that the monster she was seeing was real.”