Police officer told me to never speak of this

I’ve never told anyone this, not even my husband. But I’m feeling a little brave. I’m probably breaking the law by sharing this, because the cop said I never should, but this happened 11 years ago and I just don’t think anyone would care if I shared it. I was 20 years old, and I took a bus from New York City to New Orleans. The trip was about 24 hours. I brought a sleeping bag with me. I was young and broke and this was the cheapest way to do it. <br><br>I sat in a row of two seats near the middle of the bus, and slept across the row with my feet up. The trip was uneventful for the first 8 hours, and when we stopped at a bus station I got off to stretch my legs and look around. I noticed a man had sat in the seat ahead of me. He looked back at me and smiled, and I smiled back and went back to my seat. When I got back I noticed he had a backpack on the floor of the seat ahead of me, pushed under the seat slightly, and it seemed like there was the corner of a white plastic bag hanging out of it. <br><br>I thought that was unusual but I went back to sleep. When I woke up again, to look around, the man was not there, but his backpack was. The white plastic bag was gone. I went to the bathroom and when I came back, he was back in his seat, and he looked back at me, and smiled again. I felt uncomfortable so I asked the person next to me if I could sit in the empty seat across from us, and I did. The man turned around a couple times, and I thought he was just being weird, and tried to ignore him. <br><br>A couple hours went by, and I was tired, and a little scared, so I decided to try to sleep again. I put my headphones on and I closed my eyes. I felt a tap on my shoulder, and opened my eyes, and looked up, and the man was reaching over my head. I slapped his hand, and he said “what?” So I got up, and went to tell the bus driver something was off about that weird man, and he immediately pulled over at the next exit, and called the cops. <br><br>The cops came, and they talked to me and the driver, and then they went on the bus and talked to the man. And then they dragged him off the bus in handcuffs, and the driver and I got back in our seats. The driver told me that I just saved my own life, and probably the lives of a couple other people on the bus. He said the man had been on the run for 10 years, and was suspected of killing a couple dozen people in several states, and he and the cops were sure that he had a knife or a gun in that bag, and he was probably going to attack people on the bus. <br><br>The driver said that when I saw the bag and told him, he was going to drive to a nearby gas station, because he thought the cops would have a hard time finding the right spot on the highway. But the cops saw us pulled over and they pulled over too. The driver thanked me, and told me never to tell anyone about it because the police didn’t want the killer to know how they caught him. <br><br>And that’s it. That’s the story. I read in a local Texas newspaper a few months later that a man was arrested in the city where we stopped, but they didn’t give out his name. I don’t know if they ever caught his name, if he was ever convicted of anything, or if he is still alive. I don’t know what he looked like, because I never remembered it. But he was a man, probably in his 30’s, and he smiled at me when I looked at him. Let’s never meet again.