New Jersey house plagued by a stalker dubbed the ‘Watcher’ sells for $950K 5 years after $1.3M sale

A family that has desperately been trying to sell a home – plagued with a creepy letter-sending stalker – has finally managed to sell the property for a $400,000 loss.

Derek and Maria Broaddus sold the six-bedroom house in New Jersey for $959,360, according to a deed filed with the Union County Clerk’s office on July 1, and the new owners are Andrew and Allison Carr.

In June 2014, they purchased the Westfield home for $1,355,657 from John and Andrea Woods, who they later tried to sue in June 2015 for not disclosing information about the stalker that came with the house but the lawsuit was later thrown out.

A March 2016 listing put 657 Boulevard on the market for $1.25million and the Broadduses said they were subjected to four terrorizing anonymous letters between June 2014 and February 2017 at the place dubbed the Watcher house.

The Broadduses said they were subjected to four terrorizing anonymous letters between June 2014 and February 2017

The Watcher said their observance over the house had been passed down through the family.

‘657 Boulevard has been the subject of my family for decades now and as it approaches its 110th birthday, I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming,’ the letters stated.

‘My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time. Do you know the history of the house? Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard? Why are you here? I will find out.’

The couple also had reason to fear for their children as they received letters that specifically mentioned them. 

‘It has been years and years since the young blood ruled the hallways of the house. Have you found all of the secrets it holds yet? Will the young blood play in the basement?’ a letter read. ‘Or are they too afraid to go down there alone. I would [be] very afraid if I were them. It is far away from the rest of the house. If you were upstairs you would never hear them scream.’

The new owners of the Watcher house are named as Andrew and Allison Carr

The Broadduses managed to rent out the property while they were trying to sell it.

In December it was announced that Netflix was adapting a story about the house based on an article published in New York Magazine’s The Cut.

‘I’m happy for them they sold it,’ the Broaddus’s lawyer, Lee Levitt, told NJ.com. ‘I hope this nightmare is behind them, and I look forward to the Netflix version.

They were forced to deny they were making up a story about the Watcher and in the lawsuit against the Woods’ claimed they too had received a letter from the Watcher but failed to disclose it before the sale.

‘There’s a natural tendency to say, “I’ve lived here for 35 years; nothing’s happened to me”,’ Derek said. ‘What happened to my family is an affront to their contention that they’re safe, that there’s no such thing as mental illness in their community. People don’t want to believe this could happen in Westfield.’

Police suspect that the letters came from someone who was within a 300-yard radius of the house but Mr Broaddus believes a group was behind it.

‘It’s like cancer,’ Derek Broaddus said in an interview last November with New York Magazine.

‘Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night thinking, ‘What would my life be like if this didn’t happen?’ We lost Christmas a couple times, and you don’t get that back.’

Derek Broaddus (right) said the house is ‘like cancer’ and his June 2015 lawsuit against previous owner John Woods (left) was thrown out