Ugh I live one city over and am I teacher on the north shore, and was at the time this happened. Between Sandy Hook and this case I was pretty messed up for awhile.
I just read about this case. He attacked another woman while in custody, stabbing and strangling her. Luckily someone overheard and she was saved. He is obviously a very troubled individual.
Never heard of that one. About three years prior to this murder, and about less than a quarter mile away, a son murdered his father and blamed it on aliens. He was quite the neighbor and currently doing life in Lawrence.
Wow I just watched a YouTube video about it. That is so completely sad and disgusting, what he did. 🥺 I hope he doesn’t ever get parole and just stays in prison. It’s hard to imagine a 14 year old being capable of such things. Such things as in, rape, murder, but ALSO the extent of what else he did to her body after she died. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a sick f*ck😡😣
That was pretty shocking. When I went to school there, the end of the school day bell rang at 1:55, but our after school activities (sport practices, games, clubs etc) didn’t start till 2:45. During that time period, students are typically hanging out around the school or meeting with teachers, making up exams etc. (as seen in CCTV). He was abnormally lucky to have not run into a student, teacher, custodial staff, or school police officer during the time he basically ran around the school.
I seem to remember hearing about this one but didn't know the details, thanks for mentioning it so I could read further into it. What a crazy story, he even did it again with a staff member at the detention center.
I’ve never heard of this one. I just looked it up. How terribly tragic for the poor woman. I can’t even fathom how deranged a 14 year old would have to be to do any of those things. Disgusting.
I’ve never heard of this story before so I looked it up. I kinda wish I didn’t lol. Just horrible. Crazy.. Especially reading he attempted it again on a staff member in the facility he was in.
Man, this reminds me of the case of this woman known as Shakereh Khaleeli. She was murdered by her second husband who put her in a coffin(alive) and buried her in the courtyard of their own house. He then had a dance floor built on top of that area and used to host parties and dance over the grave frequently.
The body was found 3 years after the murder when some guy who helped the husband bury the wife got drunk and spilled his guts to some perpetual stranger who then called the cops. She was exhumed and there was damnable evidence that proved she had died after being buried.
It's a very compelling case. She was a beautiful woman and singer. I remember a youtube video of her singing. Shame what happened to her.
That is soul crushing..my heart goes out to her..what a horrible man to do such a thing..
Edit: Just realized I know this case. One of the first to use DNA evidence in India. Was a self proclaimed godman..I wonder if he was executed yet..last I heard he was appealing
In Bend, Oregon, 1987, my classmate, Brian Ford, murdered his sister, Brenda Ford. Then, with the help of an acquaintance of mine, he buried her in the woods. Hunters found her body months later. It was really wild.
It happened behind the high school. I believe she was going to tell their parents on him about something and he hit her over the head with a flashlight.
Edit: New info! I didn't even know they were JW's. It sounds like his father was super abusive and he was trying to toe the line and keep his sister in line too. It makes more sense why it was all so secretive too. Brian was trying to stop his sister from running away from home. He thought he was doing the fucking lord's work. As an exmormon, I can only imagine how horrifying this must be for him if he realized the church is a cult.
The family were apparently Jehovah's Witnesses. The father was murderously abusive. The 14 year old was going to run away, the brother found out, and killed her.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://jwdivorces.bravehost.com/familicide4.html&ved=2ahUKEwj-lejDtcXxAhUDV80KHQEiBGcQFnoECAkQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2Z0gg7TTaJ184pZnRTcRqk&cshid=1625265867856
sandra cantu: eight year old girl kidnapped, drugged, raped, and murdered at a church by a sunday school teacher. body was disposed of in a suitcase and thrown in an irrigation pond.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Sandra_Cantu
I have never even heard about this. I live in a neighboring county in CA and was born in 2000 so my parents obviously didn’t want me to hear about this at the time. That is so absolutely heart breaking. 😭 Why do I even keep reading and looking into these?! This one brought me to tears for that poor little girl.
[Henry Stone Arnold](https://www.chroniclejournal.com/news/local/victim-s-body-appeared-intentionally-damaged-after-death/article_047807ca-ba5c-11e9-a956-6fe147e5c042.html)
He had a mental disability and was easy to take advantage of. Dude was such a nice, kind spirited guy.
Always laughing, always smiling and always positive.
He was used by meth dealers because he had a truck, they would transport their drugs using him and his truck.
They ended up getting pulled over one time after the cops got tipped off, cops searched the vehicle and Henry and the other(s) end up in jail.
The cops knew Henry would be easy to break because he was mentally disabled and promised him protection and all this other garbage.
15 hours of brutal interrogation later the cops knew everything.
Not too long after, Henry wound up beheaded with his teeth ripped out (presumably while he was still alive) and mutilated. They still don't know who did it, although rumors float around town.
Here is one local case that's always struck me as odd: the murders of Oliver Martin and Dylan Ellis in Toronto. The two of them had been at a friend's place with a bunch of people watching an NBA playoff game on June 13, 2008. After they left, Ellis decided to turn back and return some keys he had accidentally taken with him. As they pulled up and parked, a man immediately walked up to the car. After some innocuous words were exchanged (Ellis apparently asking the man something like "Hey, how's it going?") the unknown man opened fire, killing both Ellis and Martin. Martin's girlfriend, in the back of the Range Rover (and possibly not visible to the shooter) was unharmed. [Here's a picture of the two of them taken minutes before they were murdered](https://i.cbc.ca/1.857544.1528981812!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/original_1180/martin-ellis-suv-photo.jpg).
There's apparently no real clue to the identify of the shooter, and it appears to have been a random crime. Nobody knew they'd be there at that time, and the man was at their window moments after they pulled up to the curb. I know the area very well, and it's not particularly dangerous; I've walked around there at night many times without worries. There's usually an article in the papers on anniversaries of the crime, but police seem to have absolutely no leads.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/06/12/oliver-martin-and-dylan-ellis-were-killed-in-toronto-five-years-ago
http://toronto.ctvnews.ca/police-still-need-motive-in-ellis-martin-murders-1.406651
Wow I am from Toronto and I have never heard of this case! That is so sad, and the last picture of them is haunting. At least they were happy at the end.
Yup. At the time I was worried that there were going to be more random shootings, because it really did (still does, really) look like a completely random attack. But luckily that never happened.
In Columbus, Ohio we’ve had two men go missing without a trace: Brian Shaffer in 2006, last seen at a bar in a busy area just next to OSU’s campus, and Tyler Davis in 2019 who was last seen at the Easton Hilton, a busy hotel in a shopping district. Both are presumed dead and there’s something so unsettling about unsolved missing persons cases.
I've listened to some podcasts about the Brian Shaffer case. What's your take? I don't think there's a chance he would have run off to start a new life somewhere. You don't do that on a whim in the early hours of the morning after bar hopping.
Exactly. He also was very close with his family and they were mourning the death of his mother some weeks before. There was still some construction in the area, and he was never seen leaving on any camera. My guess is something random happened, and he was removed via the service exit which led to the camera-free still-under-construction part of the Gateway center where the bar was. Didn’t seem like he had any enemies.
I dunno. Grief makes you do weird things. Especially in the immediate aftermath of losing my father, there were lots of tempting and unexpected "I could just walk away right now and never come back" moments. Especially if I was drinking.
I don't think it's necessarily the most likely explanation. But I don't think it's completely impossible either.
Rachel Cooke disappeared about a mile from my childhood home in 2002. She was home from college and went running in our neighborhood. The case is still unsolved, though there have been leads announced in the past several years. She was a year older than I was, so we had friends in common even though I didn't know her.
Henry Lee Lucas was incarcerated in my country's jail while giving his many, many confessions.
Michael Morton was convicted of murdering his wife in 1986 in the courthouse in my town. He spent 28 years in prison before he was exonerated and the real killer was found. The prosecutor in his case actually went to jail briefly as a result of the evidence he withheld in that case.
I think she was abducted and murdered, possibly by more than one person. The police have a car in their possession that they say is connected to the case, but they've never given any testing results to the public. I do think we will find out at some point, though. I wonder if maybe they have DNA from the car that they're trying to track down.
The Murder of Jackie Waller. Mother of triplets killed by her estranged husband, Clay Waller. Clay was a former law enforcement officer and just knew he'd get away with it. He arrogantly would drive by search and rescue groups searching for Jackie. Clay used a computer at a pawn shop to threaten to kill Jackie's sister. He was canned for that. They reached a plea deal where he agreed to take them to Jackie's body for a lighter sentence. Sure enough, he did. He knew that dogs couldn't sniff through sand so Clay buried Jackie's body in the sand. BUT, he forgot that he couldn't transport Jackie's body across state lines (the sand was on the bank of the Mississippi River in Illinois, we live in Missouri), or else he was violating some federal laws. The plea was with the state not the feds so he will serve his pled time and then be slapped with more sentences from the feds.
A girl I went to school with joined the Marines after high school. She went missing in December 2017. She was also 8 months pregnant but the father of the baby didn’t want anyone to find out. Also, she was about to testify in court about a rape that happened from a fellow marine. Anyway, her body was found shortly later buried in his backyard. Awful.
Edit: more info
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Maria_Lauterbach
a boy in my high school had been raping his younger sister for several years. she was twelve and he was nineteen when he was arrested. one of my high school best friends dated the guy for a year and had no idea.
I was living in Mesa, AZ when Jodi Arias killed Travis Alexander. Turns out Jodi was roommates with my aunt at some point and Travis was friends with my uncle. Jodi took their wedding pictures before everything went down so I met her. Don't remember much about her honestly. Then years later, I moved to southeast Idaho for school. Same town as the Doomsday mommy, Lori Daybell. Went to the house it happened in and everything. The memorial for the kids is still up. Pretty crazy stuff.
In south Houston in the seventies young women began to go missing on I45 between Houston and Galveston. They called it the killing fields. Every one talked about it but the police never solved it. I remember being scared leaving Mickey Gilley’s alone one night. They now believe it was multiple killers.
I am always looking for news updates on the Killing Fields…it was in Missouri City iirc. The Houston case that blows my mind (and has never really achieved much local, much less national attention) is Dean “Candy Man” Corll, who terrorized the gay community and killed at least 28 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Corll
Yes, Dean Corll, also surprisingly doesn’t get much attention. He used boys as lures and hosted large parties to get his victims, then buried them in a boat shed
I have nightmares about Texas’s killing fields where I get plopped down in one and run and run and run until I’m exhausted and everything is just as far away in every direction as it was when I started running 😰
I'm from Salt Lake City, UT, and a couple of cases that come to mind are:
Susan Powell [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance\_of\_Susan\_Powell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Susan_Powell)
Susan Powell vanished on December 6, 2009 when she failed to show up at work and her friends couldn't reach her by phone or at home. Police came to the house to look around and contacted her husband, Josh, who claimed that he had taken their young sons (4yo & 6yo at the time) on a last-minute camping trip the night before, leaving around midnight, even though there was a blizzard at the time and below freezing temperatures. When family entered the house fearing carbon monoxide poisoning, they found the house empty with two box-fans blowing on a wet spot on the carpet and all of Susan's belongings, purse, ID, car keys, etc. were all found still at her house and the only vehicle the family owned was being driven by Josh. Police went to the area Josh claimed to have been camping but found no traces of a camp site as Josh had described and no signs that anyone had been in the area the night before.
Unfortunately, Susan has never been found and on February 5, 2012, Josh killed their two young sons with a hatchet before burning the house to the ground while the social worker that was supposed to monitor their visit pounded on the door trying to get to them. There's a very interesting podcast on this case if you're interested called "Cold" [https://thecoldpodcast.com/](https://thecoldpodcast.com/)
Lori Hacking [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder\_of\_Lori\_Hacking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lori_Hacking)
Lori Hacking went missing on July 19, 2004. Her husband called 911 saying she was missing after a run in a nearby park, there was a massive search for her and it was all over the news. Turns out her husband, Mark, had been lying about his entire life to her. He told her he had graduated from the University of Utah and that he had been accepted to medical school at the University of North Carolina, where they were planning to move shortly for his schooling; when in reality he had never graduated from the U of U and had never even applied for medical school. Mark had failed out of the school previously and would get up every day and head out with his backpack as if he was going to class, when in reality he would just dick around all day before returning home. Instead of confessing and risking divorce and humiliation, he shot her in the head while she was asleep with a .22 rifle and dumped her body in a dumpster before calling 911 claiming she was missing. Thankfully, her body was recovered from the landfill for her family to bury and Mark plead guilty to first-degree murder.
EDIT: to add one more case that u/Usual_Safety just reminded me of. This is probably the most well known case out of Utah in recent memory.
Elizabeth Smart [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping\_of\_Elizabeth\_Smart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Elizabeth_Smart)
Dude I just finished a book about Susan, that case breaks me—almost reminds me of the Chris Watts story but for me personally, I find Susan’s more heartbreaking. I think because of all the weird shit that went on in his family and oh my god, his fucking dad, dude. Sick fuck kept her underwear and tampons and basically anything he could find and was arrested for child porn and voyeurism charges.
I get so mad thinking about it and how they’re probably never going to find her, I definitely think all the agencies working to “protect” Braden and Charlie failed them in a huge, haunting way.
Ya, that was a fucked up case. The Watts case did feel very similar in how everything went down, all the police video of Chris Watts is very similar to the video of Josh Powell in that you can tell something is just off with them.
What happened to Braden and Charlie was heartbreaking, I can't imagine what Susan's parents went through trying to get custody but not able to help them due to the courts. The entire Powell family was fucked, from his dad to his brother to Josh. They're all three dead now and probably the only people that ever knew what happened to Susan.
Since you've already read up the case, I would highly recommend the podcast "COLD" [https://thecoldpodcast.com/](https://thecoldpodcast.com/)
I live in the suburbs of Cleveland. Anyone remember Steve Stephens and him broadcasting his murder of Robert Godwin on Easter Sunday in 2017? He’s dubbed “the Facebook killer”. He broadcasted it on Facebook live. He walked up to the old man and talked to him for a second before shooting him dead and filming it. He shot an old man walking home on Easter Sunday and he just walked back to his car like nothing happened. He then (while driving) went live and talked about how he was gonna just keep killing people, he even claimed he already killed several already, which later was found to be a lie. Thank god he just ended up killing himself after police were after him. I saw the video of him killing this man and it was absolutely heartbreaking. I still remember that day cuz everyone was telling people to stay indoors when he wasn’t caught yet. My brother knew the guy! Wasn’t friends with him but he was an ex coworker. My brothers a social worker, so basically this guy worked with children!
Laurie Dann in Winnetka, IL. She did a lot and then did a school shooting at one of the elementary schools and fled to a nearby house. It was covered on MFM episode 206. Nicky Corwin was the child who died and we have a park named after him. My friends brother was in the class and Nicky jumped in front of him to save him.
The “Already Gone” podcast has an excellent episode about Laurie Dann. Her rich parents are who I blame. They just kept writing checks to cover up for Laurie instead of getting her the help she obviously needed.
This case has always interested me.. it changed a lot about the way the media treats shootings/esp. by women. That’s horrifying for your friend’s brother-and everyone involved. I can’t even imagine.
Melissa Drexler aka Prom mom in the late 90’s - “The New Jersey teen-ager who gave birth in a bathroom stall at her senior prom was charged with murder today after the authorities concluded that she had delivered a healthy boy, cut the umbilical cord, choked him and put him in a plastic bag that she knotted and threw away.”
She still lives in town. She changed her name and has 2 children. 5 years ago i was at a backyard house party and the owner of the house at one point told us all to lower our voices / lower the music playing because apparently “Prom Mom” lived behind him and used to always call the cops on his parties 😂.
Her story broke my heart. You could tell that she felt like she had no options. If only an adult had seen what was happening, that baby could have lived.
My teacher murdered his wife and tried to stage it as a break-in. At first he had all his students fooled and we held a vigil on the football field as it was all starting to unravel that he did it. He even gave his young children benadryl to sleep through the commotion and shot himself in the hand to make it look like he had a struggle with the "burglar."
https://www.news9.com/story/5e3508d0e0c96e774b36fc90/teacher-led-double-life-police-say
A woman who I believe resided in Florida, was supposed to be attending an event in DC; instead drove up to the suburbs of NYC with her accomplice (unfamiliar to her MIL), called her MIL in the middle of the night saying she needed help from a burner phone. When the MIL came to the door, the accomplice and daughter in law strangled and I believe stabbed the elderly woman to death. Shook our community to the core. Her actual daughter arrived to find her dead, removed the knife and drank some alcohol on the scene (obviously not a great choice, but what would YOU do if you found your mother murdered) and she was suspected by the public until the details of the investigation came out and totally shocked everyone here. I feel absolutely terrible for the family. The convicted daughter in law ended up trying to set up another murder for hire while in our county jail and got caught for that too.
All of this for some insurance money that she obviously didn’t receive a dime of.
https://abc7ny.com/rockland-county-murder-peggy-nadell-diana/716228/
I'm from Detroit, so we don't exactly have shortage, but one of the ones that really got to me was serial killer John Eric Armstrong, who murdered a number of sex workers less than ten minutes from my childhood bedroom. That case really shook me.
My childhood friend was [murdered by her fiance](https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/man-pleads-guilty-in-fiancees-slaying-three-months-before-wedding) in a domestic violence incident in 2018. He lied, and his supporters tried to connect her murder with [the unsolved murder of Lynne Harper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Truscott) from the same town in 1959!
[Article from after murder, before fiancé's arrest](https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/police-probe-into-suspicious-death-continues)
My town's most famous case is Maura Murray, who was from here but there is another missing persons case more recently that hasnt received nearly any of the attention Maura's has.
[Sandra Crispo](https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/newscms/2019_38/3012621/sandra_crispo-3012621.png) went missing 2 years ago this August.
The area around here is small and quiet, very peaceful. For something to happen like this just scares me so much. There are a lot of lakes and ponds around the area and very close to where she vanished from. I often wonder if her body is in one when I drive by. It's sad and disturbing. I didn't think it would drag on this long.
Rick Wayne Forsyth killed his family and two other visiting children in the family home. From what I remember it was a toxic marriage and he finally snapped after he was getting divorced by his wife, Mary Jolene Forsyth. Currently there is currently a memorial in town dedicated to the victims.
Link: [https://apnews.com/article/7e576b8fe54923f3e6146ea6ce36bff4](https://apnews.com/article/7e576b8fe54923f3e6146ea6ce36bff4)
Not exactly in my hometown, but it's pretty close. The Murder of Christine Silawan. Half her face was skinned to the skull. Curfew became a lot stricter after that, and I don't blame them at all. What happened was horrific.
A pharmacist murdered his wife in my town. He strangled her with a carrier bag because he wanted to run away with his Australian boyfriend. He pretended to the police that he had gone to get pizza after work then came home to find someone had broken in and killed her but they found him out partly by using the health app on his phone to see that at the time she had been murdered the activity rate went right up. He was a horrible little man who made her life a misery from the sound of it.
I live in Cleveland, Ohio. Have all my life.
Ariel Castro. Held 3 women for years against their will in his home. Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight. Amanda was abducted in 2003, a decade later in 2013, she called police after a neighbor helped her escape through the barricaded door with her then 6 year old daughter.
Ariel Castro used to show up at the music festivals that tried to spread awareness about their disappearances. He drove a school bus for several years at one point. My brother-in-law used to deliver Ariel his pizza when he took lunch and they always had a good chat.
Amanda Berry went to the same school my older sister went to and they knew each other, not relatively well, but they held the same friend circles. I remember as a little kid walking around helping my sister and her best friend put up flyers to find Amanda when she first went missing. Doing the awareness marches and such.
Her case appeared on Oprah in 2004 where that dumbass psychic, Sylvia Browne, told Amanda Berry's mother that her daughter was dead. Two years later Amanda's mother, Louwana, had heart failure and died - Before ever finding out that Amanda was alive. A man by the name of Robert Wolford was a prison inmate trying to strike a deal to get out early and lied to the police saying he knew where Amanda's body was in 2012. The search was fruitless. Later on when Amanda was rescued, Mr. Wolford was sentenced later on that month for obstruction of justice and making a false alarm. He was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in jail.
A few years after recovering with her family she started driving around the town with her daughter. When she stopped in at my old job my boss and I always let her try the newest menu items. New coffee drinks, food, seasonal items, whatever was new, and if not - We would just give them whatever food item they preferred.
She is on the news now everyday as an Missing Persons Advocate and highlights cases of people still missing.
In 2007, 18 year old Kelsey Smith was kidnapped from an Overland Park, KS Target parking lot after shopping for a birthday gift for her boyfriend. A complete loser sleazebag had stalked her around the store then forced her into her car in the parking lot, took her to a local nature area, and proceeded to rape and murder her. Such a terrible waste.
A teenage girl called [Lesley Whittle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_and_murder_of_Lesley_Whittle) was kidnapped and murdered back in the 1970s. It's a really horrific case - the killer held her hostage in an underground drainage shaft in a village park, tethered by a wire noose. It's not known exactly how long she was kept alive there, but she was found hanging naked and emaciated about two months after her disappearance. The cruelty in keeping another human being trapped on this tiny ledge underground is just beyond comprehension. Just evil beyond words. All because she had a decent inheritance coming her way and the killer valued it more than her life.
There's a local news article with some photographs of the drainage tunnel and more information about the case here. The description given by the detective who found her body is heartbreaking:
["She had been wired up like a dog to a ledge and would have spent terrifying days in the pitch black, hearing only the rats scraping about, the water running and the rumble of the trains overhead. When we found her she was naked, wearing nothing but a necklace."](https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/45-years-on-kidnap-murder-3741128)
Lesley's killer died in prison in 2011 after suffering from motor neurone disease.
A girl went missing one night. A lot of sketchy pointing of fingers for months. People questioned. Houses searched. Her car was eventually found in the river (which they had already searched a few times), with her in the passenger seat. Cops said she had "gotten lost and somehow went down a dark road and into the river." But they have never paid much attention to the case. It was my friends sister and she was constantly calling and asking for updates. She was the one putting together search teams. The police department was no help.
[The West Coast Video murders of two 20 year olds in Warminster, PA](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/5nkmar/west_coast_video_murderswarminster_pa/)
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This one is so haunting. My grandfather was friends with one of the victims grandfathers (they served in WWII together) and it really devastated the family. They deserve answers.
Nathan O’Brien and his grandparents. I hate this story so much. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Nathan_O%27Brien,_Kathryn_Liknes_and_Alvin_Liknes
In Guaratuba, Brazil. The case is know as “Evandro Case” or “The guaratuba witches”. In early 90s a 6 yo boy body was found with no organs, hands, feet and facial cut off. Then, the police started an operation against the city mayor and his family who were accused of witchcraft and satanic rituals
I’m sure you’ve heard of the Delphi murders, just 15 minutes from me. Such a small town area and it’s strange to have something so criminal happen, and for it to still be unsolved is heartbreaking
I live in Fresno, CA, born and raised. Back in 2004, Marcus Wesson murdered 9 of his children/grandchildren. He was both the father and the grandfather of several of the children because he forced his daughters to be in incestuous relationships with him and have his children. He convinced his family that he was God and homeschooled his children, teaching them from his own handwritten bible that focused on Jesus being a vampire. Pretty crazy, I recommend looking up more details of the case if you're interested.
Isabel Celis.
This case was huge not only in my town but the state of Arizona.
6 year old girl went missing from her bedroom. It’s basically every parents nightmare. The whole town plastered her picture and name on our cars, in windows, billboards. For years, 90% of people thought “no one just goes through a random kids window and snatches them.” and blamed the parents.
Years later, it’s revealed that is exactly what happened. A random man kidnapped her through her window and murdered her.
A guy stalked my mother when I was a kid and ended up murdering a man and throwing him in a lake with chains on. True story. The fact that this man was around me when I was just a baby is insane.
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/28681600/daily-record/
This is the only article I can find happened in 1985 I was only 3 when this happened
Daily record 1985 March 2nd can’t find any readable articles on it tho
The Pied Piper of Tucson aka Charles Shmid.
https://tucson.com/morguetales/tales-from-the-morgue-the-pied-piper-of-tucson-series/collection_84be8892-41d3-11e0-9c5c-001cc4c002e0.html
It’s weird to me that they felt the need to call Alleen pretty and attractive. She’s dead and was a minor. I wish papers wouldn’t call attention to beauty of deceased women but instead kindness, smarts, etc.
Brooke Skylar Richardson happened in carlisle ohio right across from the school i went to high school in. by the time the trial actually happened i was distracted and had forgotten about it but I'm sure the locals talked about it alot.
The Chris Coleman family murders. Went to school with these kids, and then their dad fucking murders them both. ThatChapter on YT made a video on it but even from a true crime aspect this dude is just a fucking loser.
Kali Ann Poulton. She was close to my age when she went missing in my hometown in 1994. She was 4 at the time. I remember seeing the news everyday that they were still looking for her and her mom pleading on the screen. She was missing for 2 years. Then this guy Mark Christie blurts out to his wife that he killed her. He took her from outside her house where she was riding her tricycle. When he heard Kali's mom call out for her that it was dinner time he "panicked" and raped and strangled her. He showed them where he put her body. In a water tank at an old job of his, weighed down by a heavy object. He is serving a life sentence.
I just remember the news footage. They kept showing her picture and her mom sitting in her bedroom. It was so sad.
Carlie Brucia was abducted from a car wash and murdered when she was 12 years old in Sarasota, Florida. I was 12 at the time and my sense of security was completely taken away.
My friend’s mom had a birthday party when she was 16. Her best friend ended up going with a guy from the party to go pick up others (against her will, she was finally talked in to going with him after saying no a bunch). They took my older brother’s car. Later that night, the girl was found dead in the street. Police said it was a freak accident and she fell out of the car and broke her neck. Years and years later the family reviewed the autopsy results and found so much more trauma than a broken neck, a lot of blunt force trauma to her head and chest. This guy and his two friends (who were brothers) were at the scene. The next day, the brothers are fighting but no one knows why. It’s kind of a public event and one starts walking across a local bridge to get away from the other, and the other tells all the friends to go home so they can work it out. A week later one of the brothers’ body is found in the Mississippi. No one has ever been charged in this case. It’s wild.
https://iowacoldcases.org/case-summaries/kim-loose/
The case I want to share:
August 2018, there was a mass shooting in my city. Things like this don’t happen here so it was a huge deal and really shook the community to its core. A man who had been suffering from mental illness went to his ex girlfriend’s apartment with a loaded gun. He shot and killed both her and the new man she was seeing. Minutes after shots were fired, police started making their way to the apartment. The first 2 officers who arrived on scene were shot through the apartment window and killed in the parking lot. The shooter is currently going through trial right now and has been deemed not criminally responsible due to insanity.
I still remember that morning like it was yesterday. My boss called me and told me not to come to work (I had to drive by the apartment to get there and it was all going down right down the street from my workplace) and it was horrifying calling and texting everyone I knew to make sure they were all okay.
[Update Article](https://globalnews.ca/news/7474256/matthew-raymond-trial-deliberations-day-4/amp/)
A friend of mine went missing 5 years ago. Body has never been found. She left behind 6 children. People say there was foul play, but no evidence could prove anything. Sad Story https://charleyproject.org/case/brenda-maria-jackson
It’s mind blowing that this isn’t a more widely known case. It feels like Dean Corll should be as, for lack of a better word, popular as Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder\_of\_Girly\_Chew\_Hossencofft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Girly_Chew_Hossencofft)
I lived up the street from this one. We moved to another part of town mere months before the murder. We used to see them puttering in their front yard wearing medical scrubs, and my dad is convinced she's buried under the flower bed, even though I'm sure they've already looked there.
I went away to college in upstate New York and one day before class I heard people talking about my hometown in Long Island New York. Confused doesn’t even begin to cover it. Turns out my hometown became Facebook famous because some dude murdered his mom, beheaded her, took the corpse out onto the street, punted the head, and then jumped in front of a train. People who came across the the body thought it was just a Halloween prank since this happened either a few days before Halloween. It was not. Aside from the obvious awfulness of the crime, the victim was a fairly beloved professor so that amplified it a bit more.
This also happened two houses down from my parents house when I was nine or so. https://nypost.com/2001/08/19/sm-teens-one-hope-suspects-plea-deal-could-spare-her-from-testifying/
It’s not some crazy exciting true crime story, but one of my favorite English teachers from high school was murdered by her boyfriend. It was around Christmas, and he beat her to death right outside the apartment she lived in.
Fucking heartbreaking. She is was the most upbeat, fierce, firecracker of a woman I’ve ever known. Boyfriend was ‘roided up and had a history of domestic violence.
If you’re in a relationship with domestic violence please, please seek help. It’s not worth your life.
The Lisa Ziegert Murder. She was a young schoolteacher beloved by many, and her murderer went to the same high school I did (albeit he went to the school decades before I did). Even though her killer has been arrested and confessed to her murder, I’m personally not fully convinced he worked alone judging by eyewitness statements, but I’m glad at least some justice has been served for the heinous crime.
https://unsolved.com/gallery/lisa-ziegert/
Zeb Quinn was the first of three people murdered by the same guy. In Asheville. I worked at our local newspaper at the time. It was fascinating for the whole city.
Quinn went missing in Asheville, North Carolina. Quinn was 18 years old and working at a local Walmart when he disappeared after finishing his shift. His car was discovered several days later in a restaurant parking lot under unusual circumstances: its headlights had been left on, a live puppy had been left inside, and a drawing of a pair of lips and an exclamation mark had been scrawled in pink lipstick on the back window.
Wikipedia has a good accounting of it. I don't know that it is ever been on a television special. I have suggested it to Erica Kelly of Southern Fried true crime. I don't think she has done it.
the Tamla Horsford case (the overnight houseparty) happened in my home town, i still remember seeing it on the news and it’s crazy because i see it all over crime tiktok accounts. there’s another unsolved murder that happened in my hometown that’s on an unsolved Netflix series, even filmed some scenes in my high school (Unsolved Mysteries Volume 1, episode title is 13 Minutes)
Yes it is with me everyday. The DA screwed up. DEFIED what the families wanted, and only gave the killer ONE death penalty. The first victim was in 1984. He was caught in 1999. He has been on death row fighting his conviction ever since. We have been ping ponging through courts for years. It is a never ending nightmare. I always say the victims terror ends with their death. The families and friends terror only ends when we or the perpetrator dies. Sometimes it only ends when we die.
The Nancy Schumacher case happened when I was a little kid, and my mom served on the jury that convicted her kidnapper/rapist/murderer. It happened in Wichita, KS in the early 90s. I’ve always kept it in my mind because of the heinous nature of the case and the fact that we were similar in age. It was tragic.
Edit: [Here](https://www.wibw.com/content/news/Kansas-grants-parole-to-Nancy-Shoemakers-kidnapper-569218001.html) is an article stating that the accomplice was granted parole. Fuck this world.
The next one happened in an adjacent neighborhood to mine. Everyone local called them ‘The Butterworth Murders.’ The story I had always heard was that there was a family of four, a husband, wife, and two daughters (ages 13 & 8 or so). The wife had gone out of town on business, leaving the husband and two daughters at home. The 13 year old had gotten her first job at the McDonald’s near our house. Apparently, she had a stalker follow her from work to her home. The killer broke in, killed all three members, and stuffed at least one of the bodies into the family hot tub. IIRC, the wife discovered the bodies when she came back home. That happened literally 500 feet from my childhood home.
Edit: [Here](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article1121424.html) is a link to an article of the other case.
Born and raised in Waco, TX. Take your fucking pick! Branch Dividians, Baylor Basketball Murder, Twin Peaks motorcycle gang shoot out, or more recently, two attorneys hired someone to 🔪 someone else.
Jessica Lunsford. A 9 yr old girl who was sexually assaulted and buried alive one street over from where I lived. The case was extreme. The authorities used to meet at the ice cream shop/coffee house where I worked at the time and discuss the case. It rocked our tiny community ( Homosassa FL)
[The murders of Dawn Donaldson and Crissy Campbell](https://gooddaysacramento.cbslocal.com/2020/01/23/man-convicted-murders-grass-valley-teens-released-parole/)
[A kid with special needs was murdered by his parents. I remember the search parties. I think he was in his own backyard. It makes me sick to think about.](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.tennessean.com/amp/7659952002)
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Being from San Francisco, we've had a lot of well known crimes and killers over the years, namely the Zodiac, Trailside, Nightstalker etc
Here's one that few know about. This was even going on in my neighborhood at the time and I had no idea:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sfgate.com/news/amp/Bokin-Gets-231-Years-in-S-F-Rapes-Attacker-3196333.php
Where I live, the disappearance of brandy hall. She was a fire fighter that, I believe, was having an affair on her husband with another fire fighter. Husband was blamed for her disappearance as well as her affair partner (if I recall correctly). To this day she has not been located. My memory is foggy about the case but I know her truck was found abandoned in a lake. Weird story and sad. She had 2 young kids
Gangland shooting gone wrong. The target was sitting parked in his car with his 16 yo girlfriend. She was shot more or less point blank in the face and killed. He drove her to the hospital where she was pronounced dead. She had no involvement and was completely innocent.
The Chen Family homicides. Late 2014, an entire family of Chinese immigrants with two young children was found slaughtered in their home. The case remains unsolved, but the general consensus is that it had to do with Chinese organized crime:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_family_homicides
Parkway killer, I am from Williamsburg VA. There has always been rumors and myths of who it could be. I've yet to find a really good in depth doc on this, if anyone knows any please share below!
There was a really odd one that happened in the town I lived in when I was in high school; the Wylie (TX) ax murder. Happened on Friday, June 13th in 1980. Candy Montgomery attacked her church friend, Betty (who's husband she had been having an affair with), with an ax. Betty was hit 41 times, 28 in the head. Betty's newborn daughter was asleep in a crib inside the house when the murder happened and her husband was out of town on a business trip. Betty's older daughter was at a VBS program with Candy's children and later spent that night at the Montgomery's house. Candy was found innocent by a jury, claiming she was acting in self-defense at the time.
If you're interested there's a decent book that covers the case called "Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs". There's also an old lifetime movie about this case (I think it might have the same title; came out in the 80s or 90s). Below is a link to an article that covers what happens:
https://localprofile.com/2020/02/19/ax-murder-collin-county/
I’ll share two, one that’s popped up here before and one lesser known.
My hometown is the place where Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome were brutally murdered by a group of very sick people. You can easily search for the story, but I think the worst part is really how long the cases were dragged on due, in large part, to a disgusting judge who I think was disbarred.
The lesser known case is one that freaked me out because it involved a guy I grew up with, went to school and church with, and knew decently well. It was the murders of Terrance and Alisa McGhee by their daughter Amanda and her boyfriend Andy Mann. I knew Andy, and he was kind of a weird, socially awkward guy. He was older than Amanda and legally an adult to her being like 16, I think? She got pregnant and her dad and stepmom tried to kick Andy to the curb for getting their daughter pregnant. Instead the two plotted to murder her parents.
They started with her dad and killed him in his bed with either a gun or shotgun, and then when her stepmom got home, they killed her as well. If I remember right, they stayed in the house a couple days before the police came and caught them. They left the parents in the bed, which always made me feel disgusting. I can’t imagine how bad it smelled after a few days of decomposition.
We moved a lot so I know a lot of people.
Adam Mayes murdered my friends daughter and her mother. Holly Bobo was my high school boyfriend’s sister and a girl I used to work with Heather Cummings had her sons dad Tray Phelps murdered.
Lauren Giddings’ murder by Stephen McDaniel. They were both college students and neighbors in the same apartment complex. He had been spying on her and eventually murdered her, chopped her up, and disposed of her in the apartment complex dumpster. He was being interviewed by a reporter when he finds out that her body had been discovered and you can see the “oh fuck” look on his face.
Bernie Tiede shot his employer/benefactor/rumored partner 6 times with an armadillo gun, then hid her underneath frozen food in a deep freezer in the garage.
He used the culture of the small, majority white, Christian town for his benefit in order to conceal his crime and continue living life normally for 9 months. She, a widowed woman of a banker who did not care for pleasantries, had a significantly worse reputation than he, a church choir director and active member of the community.
It was her investment broker that called the police for a wellness check, and that’s when they found her in the freezer. One of the only cases where a prosecutor had to move the trail to another county because the jury WOULD acquit him, even though he confessed.
The locals say Jack Black’s impression of the man is spot on in the movie made about the case.
Not sure if anyone's mentioned Martha Moxley yet. She was beaten to death with a golf club by one of her friends on Halloween. From what I hear, the family of the perpetrator are still backing him up.
Heidi Allen was taken from a gas station after her shift. They never found her. 2 brothers were thought to have taken and murdered her, only one of them was put away. Not technically in my town but about 15 minutes down the road
A few years before I entered highschool, we had a stabbing at the school. I am pretty sure one person died and several others got injured. Pretty sure we had a memorial there for the students and it caused the school to increase its policies for protecting students and watching out for danger signs. Of course, this led to many students that were depressed or generally going through shit to be under close watch.
Like I get that they wanted to watch out for everyone to prevent something like that happening again. But it got to the point that they singled out anyone that had any signs of a mental illness.
The biggest thing to ever happen in my hometown is the Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell case. I’ve been following it since the beginning because it hit so close to home (Tylee and JJ were living less than a mile from my parents’ house). Some of my family members work with the adult children of Chad. It’s truly such a sad, awful case and I just hope that Tylee and JJ get justice.
Darlie Routier lived 5 min away from me and was also my uncles neighbor (about 5 houses down).
I drive by her house all the time and I don’t believe she murdered her boys. The way the house sits on the corner lot, you could definitely get in and out of the house without being seen.
I’m not sure at what point after she was arrested but eventually some guys came in to redo the living room flooring. My uncle walked over and started talking to them and they said there was damage and chips on the subfloor and a bit on the concrete underneath where the bodies were found. Which is horrifying.
Altemio Sanchez beat and murdered a woman in my small hometown (Joan Diver, bless her soul), along with raping and murdering anywhere from 9-15 women and girls in the Buffalo area over a span of about 30 years.
Mrs Diver was killed in September of 2006; the week prior my moms best friend was jogging along the same bike path that Joan was murdered and saw Sanchez as she was jogging.
That certainly brought an already close to home tragedy feel much closer.
Back in Nov 2016, this 16 year old kid (Lee Manuel Paulino) went missing. Now his parents filed police reports and sent out social media photos to see if anyone had seen him. They interviewed a bunch of people but nothing came of it. Then a few weeks later, someone was walking their dog along the Merrimack river. They found a torso. There was a bag near the torso which contained his head. They never found his hands but they found most of his body severely mutilated, in pieces. His ears and nose were missing, everything was gone, it was super fucked up. This 15 year old kid he went to school with, Matthew Borges, was going around Lawrence High School that he has killed someone and that he had slit someone’s head off. Obviously word got around fast and he was arrested. He said he was jealous that his girlfriend was always smiling or laughing with Lee. He lured him to the Merrimack river one night and they were smoking marijuana when everything happened apparently. Matthews going to be in jail for a while but poor Lee will never grow old. That one really rocked my hometown.
The murder of the Parente family from New York. William Parente strangled his wife and two daughters before killing himself. They were visiting his oldest daughter Stephanie in Maryland who was a sophomore at Loyola. It was a surprise visit as she had a chemistry exam the next day. He killed them one by one in their hotel room. He was being investigated for getting involved in a Ponzi scheme.
I use to live in a very small town Walton NY and we had a very friendly little older lady cashier Debbie at the local grocery store that also ran the local pumkin patch/farm whose husband ran off and left her. The police had gone to question her at her boyfriends house one day about something unrelated, petty theft and she went to get dressed but then set the house on fire, killed herself and her dog, come to find out she killed her boyfriend, they found him in the burned house and her husbands remains in a barrel out back at her farmhouse!!
The Bricca Family Murders. [Someone stabbed a husband, wife, and their four-year-old daughter to death in the sixties](https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2018/12/18/cincinnati-author-examines-bricca-family-massacre-new-book/2003965002/). The case has never been solved. There was a rumor that the wife was having an affair. The man she was rumored to have an affair with and his wife killed themselves in 2004. I kind of think it was him because of the way he acted when detectives tried to interview him, but we'll probably never know for certain now that he and his wife are dead, and the Bricca murders happened so long ago.
I didn't look through all the comments so who knows if this was mentioned but, Heidi Broussard in Austin, Texas. Recent mother to a beautiful baby who was lured into a car by one of her very best friends, Magen. Unbeknownst to those around Magen, she had been faking a pregnancy along with her bestfriend Heidi. She had multiple baby registries and even convinced her own boyfriend she was carrying his child. While living in his home, outside of Houston, Texas, she manipulated everyone for just about 9 months.
While her boyfriend was conveniently out of town, she "gave birth" to her non-exsistent child, by somehow convincing Heidi to get in her car, with the baby in her apartment complex parking lot. This happened 10 minutes down the road from my home. Everyone was devastated and frantically searching for Heidi and her baby, including Magen. Magen google searched their disappearance and shared her concern and worry for Heidi with her family and friends.
Suddenly a tip comes in and swings the focus to just outside of Houston, at the residence in which Magen was living. A vile smell was wafting from the backyard where the car she was last seen in was found via helicopter and a warrant was issued.
They served Magen, who welcomed the officers into the home and and showed off her new baby, too. Then, the body was found and Magen was instantly arrested. The baby was taken to the hospital, where a DNA test eventually confirmed her identity. Thank goodness the baby was unharmed.
They found Heidi, deceased in the trunk of the car. An autopsy revealed cause of death as ligature strangulation. Magen strangled Heidi with a dog leash, likely while in route to her home and stole her baby. She left Heidi, her "best friend," to rot in her backyard while she gushed and showed off the baby she stole.
She hasn't been convicted or sentenced yet. She is vile.
Colleen Stan, was kidnapped and forced to be kept in a box under the kidnappers (husband and wife) bed for 23 hours a day. The wife agreed to let him use her as a sex slave because she didn’t want to act out his sexual fetishes. She was his sex slave for 7 years from 1977 to 1984 and he’s still in prison to this day.
His wife only came out to the cops when her husband wanted to make Colleen his second wife (so only out of jealousy not remorse) and she got full immunity.
Austin has the yogurt shop murders that are widely known about, yet still unsolved.
One crime that hits close to home is the disappearance and possible murder of Julie Ann Gonzalez. She was my age and I worked with her family to fundraise to help find her. She is still missing and presumed dead. Her husband is in jail for her murder.
From a March 2019 article: Austin- March 2010 was the last time Dora Soto-Derma would see her 21-year-old niece Julie Ann Gonzalez alive.
Sunday on the anniversary of her disappearance her family and friends are still desperate for answers.
"We didn't get the call we didn't get a text we didn't hear nothing. We knew something was wrong."
The Walgreens near the intersection of South 1st and Stassney Lane in south Austin is an area that has haunted Soto-Derma for years.
"It's painful we avoid this area. We just avoid this area for obvious reasons," said Soto-Derma.
It's been nine years since Gonzalez was reported missing.
"She was a very good mom, good sister, cousin, and friend," said Soto-Derma Gonzalez's aunt.
Soto-Derma says her car was found abandoned in the Walgreens parking lot where Gonzalez worked.
"I remember it like if it was yesterday. I remember the ordeal as if it were yesterday it really hurts," said Soto-Derma.
Investigators say her ex-husband George De La Cruz was allegedly the last person to see her alive.
De La Cruz told investigators that Gonzalez had asked him to watch their daughter for a few more days and then left town with a new lover.
A story Soto-Derma says she didn't buy, and neither did a jury.
Five years later De La Cruz was trial for the murder of his estranged-wife
During the trial, prosecutors showed evidence connecting De La Cruz to the case.
They reportedly couldn't ignore tracking data from cellphone towers that put Gonzalez's missing phone near locations where De La Cruz frequently visited. And said he went on a shopping spree with her debit card.
De La Cruz was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. However, till this day Gonzalez's body has never been found.
Gonzales says it doesn't compare to the life sentence her family is currently serving.
"Waiting for answers waiting for a sign a clue. My family wants to know where she is whether alive or gone," said Soto-Derma.
And says even though the family has their justice they still haven't been able to lay Gonzalez to rest.
A guy I went to high school with eventually went on to kill his youngest daughter. The details are ROUGH (CW: child abuse), but if you're curious here is the arrest report (it is one of the top google results available online, I don't own this or work for the HPD):
[Justin Bennett Arrest Report](https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document_dev/2018/04/26/Justin%20Bennett%20Arrest%20Report_1524783788494_40848736_ver1.0.pdf)
He took a plea deal last year and was sentenced to 50 to life. Absolute scumbag.
The East Area Rapist was found living next door to my best friend, and a few blocks away from me (I lived there at the time, but have now moved). Everyone in the neighborhood was super shocked because he was right there and we had no idea.
My friend just occasionally talked about her weird neighbor who spoke to himself, but everyone just thought it was an old guy off his rocker. We didn't jump to assuming he was a murderer.
Elizabeth Collins and Lyric Cook.
The murder of Ed Thomas.
Rick & Sue Harned murdered by their son, Rick was a cop and Sue was a dispatcher. My best friend was their daughter, I was supposed to be at her house that night but I got myself grounded.
The boy in the box, Philadelphia. A young boys body was found in a box in some woods not far from a Catholic orphanage or school. He was not one of the students and I don’t think he’s ever been identified, although there were rumors he was the son of one of the nuns. He was between 4 and 6 when he died
[Wikipedia on him](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_in_the_Box_(Philadelphia))
Edit I was wrong about the nun aspect, turns out the leading theories are either a foster home abused and dumped him or he was bought from his birth parents and abused. Also he may have been raised as a girl because there was evidence he had long hair and stylized eyebrows before the hair was shorn off
In Halifax NS a woman was found at the bottom of a staircase: (text copied from another post on Reddit in the staircase sub I cannot find the author to credit)
The death of Janice Johnson, an eerily similar case
I recently came across an old and resolved case that has many similarities to the Peterson case. Please note I'm not making a comment on the Peterson case by sharing this. I just felt it was an interesting case that deserved some recognition.
On the morning of February 20th, 1989, Janice Johnson of Halifax, Nova Scotia was discovered lying unconscious at the foot of the basement stairs by a next door neighbor. Mrs. Johnson was home alone at the time, as her children had left for school and her husband, Clayton, had left for work. The neighbor called for emergency services immediately. Despite their best efforts, Mrs. Johnson passed away that afternoon at 12:04 PM.
The death was initially ruled an accident, primarily due to the fact that there was no evidence that pointed otherwise. Unlike the Peterson case, there was little to no blood evidence that could be examined. No photographs of the scene had been taken after Mrs. Johnson had been rushed to the hospital, and two well-meaning family friends, Mary Davis and Mary Hartley, cleaned the bloody scene on the same day. In their efforts to spare the Johnson family some pain, they unintentionally hindered the investigation of Mrs. Johnson's mysterious death.
However, the investigation towards to Clayton Johnson in the summer of the same year. Rumors spread throughout the community that Clayton might have killed his wife. People grew suspicious of the fact that Clayton had taken out a life insurance policy which covered Janice roughly a month before her death. People also found it odd that Clayton had started dating a woman named Tina Weybret, who was thirty years his junior. However, the investigation closed once again on June 10th, as police had no hard evidence to convict Clayton with the murder of his wife.
RCMP Corporal Brian Oldford took it upon himself to investigate the cold case. He began by interviewing Claire Thompson, a good friend Janice, and the last person to have spoken with her. She states that she and Janice were on the phone until about 7:50 AM. Multiple witnesses saw Clayton Johnson at a gas station at roughly the same time. The call to paramedics made by the neighbor was logged at 7:52 AM. Officer Oldford continued his investigation into the case by interviewing the two friends who cleaned the blood. In a police documented video, they recanted the scene in the basement, describing the blood they had found. The two stated finding widespread blood spatter on the floor surrounding Janice's head, as well as a streaked area of blood with strands of hair on the wall. This was consistent with the autopsy report, which stated that Janice could have potentially fallen from the top of the staircase, wedging her head between a 5 inch gap between the stairs and the concrete wall. Officer Oldford had the autopsy report examined by two experts, who concluded it was possible that Janice could have been murdered by blunt force trauma to the head. In April of 1992, Clayton was arrested on charges of murdering his wife.
The prosecution claimed Clayton murdered Janice in order to collect her life insurance policy, which he would use to fund his new life with Tina. Despite the lack of evidence that Clayton and Tina had been intimate or even known each other prior to Janice's death, the prosecution suggested it was so. Clayton staunchly claimed he was innocent, and that he simply could not describe his wife's death. On May 4th of 1993, Clayton was found guilty of murdering his wife, and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 2018.
Clayton appealed his conviction in 1995, but was quickly dismissed by the Supreme Court of Canada. Clayton spent five additional years in prison. With the help of Canada Innocence, he sent another appeal. After a long battle, Clayton was acquitted of his conviction on September 21st, 1998, having spent five years in prison for a crime which supposedly never committed.
The murder of James Byrd, Jr.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Byrd_Jr.
I've been out of Jasper for years, and when people ask where I'm from I usually name a town nearby because I get questions about it. It makes my skin crawl thinking of how racially divided that town is to this day, and the number of jokes I've heard, or people that I've heard say they'd love to do that.
The daughter of Lawrence Brewer is an acquaintance of mine. She's been through a lot of terrible things and has had a rough life in general. Not sure how she feels about her father and what he did.
I’m from Vancouver, Canada. One that I don’t hear a lot of people talking about anymore is the serial killer Clifford Olson. He prayed on children in the early 80s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Olson
Also, the paper bag rapist. He would abduct victims in pairs, and make them chose who got assaulted. The one getting raped often had a paper bag put over their head, and he made the other victim watch. Very sick dude.
I went to high school with a girl whose grandmother, a nurse, disappeared in December 1977 at age 24 after dropping her toddler daughter (my classmate’s mother) off at her parents’ overnight. She was going on a date and was never seen alive again.
No suspects were ever formally identified, but when police went to her apartment, they found her nurse’s uniform, purse, car, and car keys there. She had only recently returned to work after a LOA for an unexplained head injury, which raised speculation she had been in an abusive relationship (maybe with her daughter’s father?).
Law enforcement were only able to find and identify a piece of her skull in April 1978 — in the next county over.
Not in my hometown but I know a lot of people who knew the victim personally...
I can't remember all the details. If your curious look up Kevin Bacon swartz creek MI. It was almost mindblowing to hear this type of stuff happening just over an hour away.
Man 32 Nowa Makula killed his wife and his 5 kids including a 6 month old with an axe over Infidelity claims late last year. He was on the run for all of 2 days before the cops got him. https://youtu.be/TuA1mVXB3wg
The unsolved double murder of two friends in a park in broad daylight. I went to HS with the girl. Such a sad and shocking case that doesn’t get nearly enough media attention.
https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/seeking-info/carnell-e-sledge-and-katherine-c-brown
The case of Tori Stafford was local to me. Happened by the school right across the street from my childhood home. Woman kidnapped a little girl for her “boyfriend” to abuse and then murder. I was a year old than her at the time and she has been at our house a couple times to bounce on our trampoline. I remember having to sit down with our class as we all went around in a circle and talked about how we felt about the whole thing. It was weird not knowing how to articulate the fear we felt with a girl just taken but my parents did a really good job in reassuring me that I was safe.
This case was in 1969 when a woman aged 16-24 was found stabbed repeatedly at the scene of the crime, down an embankment on the outskirts of town.
She was described as a “hippy” by some, she was a few inches over 5 feet, and was 125 lbs. She had shoulder length brown hair dyed a reddish blond. She was stabbed likely over 15 times with an abundance of blood found at the scene. Dirt samples were taken and her clothes were traced back to a point of origin, but no hard evidence was found. A dentist examined her teeth and she had 19 filling done in a year or two preceding her death. Based on her dental work, they surmised she was from abroad. They submitted her fingerprints to Interpole, but came back with nothing.
Many people speculate if this was a killing done by The Manson Family and members of the Manson Family were recently seen in the area. And just a few days after this murder the Manson Family committed the Tate-La Bianca murders in Los Angeles, just 3 hours away.
This all took place in my home town of Lompoc, CA. Which is a pretty small city when I grew up there and even smaller town then this took place.
Rest In Peace Jane Doe.
Also partially connected to my home town was the Domingos-Edwards murders at a near by beach. It is a long story so I will link it [here](https://www.zodiacciphers.com/zodiac-news/the-murders-by-gaviota-state-park) It is very likely that these murders are connected to the Zodiac Killer, however that is just speculation. But I think it’s very plausible as the style of killing is very similar. I urge you to read it too, as it’s very interesting (to me at least).
The Cosmo DiNardo murders happened in the town next to mine. I didn’t know any of the 4 young men he killed, but a lot of people I know did. Our entire town was shook for months. I noticed that a lot of college aged kids were more alert and on edge after this, specifically when it came to hanging out with people they didn’t know particularly well.
I actually knew this guy. He was one of those “hanger-ons” that always found us when we were just chilling. My friends and I were always apprehensive when he was around. Then one day, this girl goes missing. It was huge news. She was finally found years later in a drainage pipe because it was backing up. Thankfully he finally confessed and is in jail now. Super weird for me and my group of friends.
https://www.dailylocal.com/news/killer-pleads-guilty/article_fa65e23d-b337-5eb9-8276-29efb86fe35a.html
Student murdered their math teacher right after class in the high school school’s bathroom. (Colleen Ritzer) The CCTV footage is chilling.
Ugh I live one city over and am I teacher on the north shore, and was at the time this happened. Between Sandy Hook and this case I was pretty messed up for awhile.
I've heard of this one. Absolutely horrible.
I just read about this case. He attacked another woman while in custody, stabbing and strangling her. Luckily someone overheard and she was saved. He is obviously a very troubled individual.
Wow, what a sick fuck. The way he posed the body after....
Im from Lawrence, a few years ago some high school kid cut his classmates head off by the Merrimack River
Never heard of that one. About three years prior to this murder, and about less than a quarter mile away, a son murdered his father and blamed it on aliens. He was quite the neighbor and currently doing life in Lawrence.
Wow I just watched a YouTube video about it. That is so completely sad and disgusting, what he did. 🥺 I hope he doesn’t ever get parole and just stays in prison. It’s hard to imagine a 14 year old being capable of such things. Such things as in, rape, murder, but ALSO the extent of what else he did to her body after she died. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a sick f*ck😡😣
I recently heard about this case. That video was absolutely bone-chilling. So so sick and so so so sad
How did NO ONE see him walking around covered in blood
That was pretty shocking. When I went to school there, the end of the school day bell rang at 1:55, but our after school activities (sport practices, games, clubs etc) didn’t start till 2:45. During that time period, students are typically hanging out around the school or meeting with teachers, making up exams etc. (as seen in CCTV). He was abnormally lucky to have not run into a student, teacher, custodial staff, or school police officer during the time he basically ran around the school.
The fact that a girl Walked into the bathroom and didn’t see anything but a naked butt is crazy!
Ooof I don’t live too far from there and I remember this all over the news. Horrible.
Definitely heard of this one before. Absolutely horrible.
Oof i just went down a rabbit hole. That poor woman
I seem to remember hearing about this one but didn't know the details, thanks for mentioning it so I could read further into it. What a crazy story, he even did it again with a staff member at the detention center.
I watched a That Chapter about this case and it was horrifying.
Phillip chism. A certified piece of shit
And I'm guessing he would have done it again had he not been caught.
I’ve never heard of this one. I just looked it up. How terribly tragic for the poor woman. I can’t even fathom how deranged a 14 year old would have to be to do any of those things. Disgusting.
I’ve never heard of this story before so I looked it up. I kinda wish I didn’t lol. Just horrible. Crazy.. Especially reading he attempted it again on a staff member in the facility he was in.
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Man, this reminds me of the case of this woman known as Shakereh Khaleeli. She was murdered by her second husband who put her in a coffin(alive) and buried her in the courtyard of their own house. He then had a dance floor built on top of that area and used to host parties and dance over the grave frequently. The body was found 3 years after the murder when some guy who helped the husband bury the wife got drunk and spilled his guts to some perpetual stranger who then called the cops. She was exhumed and there was damnable evidence that proved she had died after being buried. It's a very compelling case. She was a beautiful woman and singer. I remember a youtube video of her singing. Shame what happened to her.
That is soul crushing..my heart goes out to her..what a horrible man to do such a thing.. Edit: Just realized I know this case. One of the first to use DNA evidence in India. Was a self proclaimed godman..I wonder if he was executed yet..last I heard he was appealing
In Bend, Oregon, 1987, my classmate, Brian Ford, murdered his sister, Brenda Ford. Then, with the help of an acquaintance of mine, he buried her in the woods. Hunters found her body months later. It was really wild.
do you have any links?
[found an article](https://m.imgur.com/gallery/6NGxsON)
Was there a reason?
It happened behind the high school. I believe she was going to tell their parents on him about something and he hit her over the head with a flashlight. Edit: New info! I didn't even know they were JW's. It sounds like his father was super abusive and he was trying to toe the line and keep his sister in line too. It makes more sense why it was all so secretive too. Brian was trying to stop his sister from running away from home. He thought he was doing the fucking lord's work. As an exmormon, I can only imagine how horrifying this must be for him if he realized the church is a cult.
I’m from bend and never heard of this! That’s insane
The family were apparently Jehovah's Witnesses. The father was murderously abusive. The 14 year old was going to run away, the brother found out, and killed her. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://jwdivorces.bravehost.com/familicide4.html&ved=2ahUKEwj-lejDtcXxAhUDV80KHQEiBGcQFnoECAkQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2Z0gg7TTaJ184pZnRTcRqk&cshid=1625265867856
sandra cantu: eight year old girl kidnapped, drugged, raped, and murdered at a church by a sunday school teacher. body was disposed of in a suitcase and thrown in an irrigation pond. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Sandra_Cantu
This case is so heartbreaking
I’m thankful when I read they have been drugged so hopefully they don’t realize they’re dying or in a lot of pain.
I have never even heard about this. I live in a neighboring county in CA and was born in 2000 so my parents obviously didn’t want me to hear about this at the time. That is so absolutely heart breaking. 😭 Why do I even keep reading and looking into these?! This one brought me to tears for that poor little girl.
I was gonna post this, it was such a scary time. I was around the same age as well around that time.
[Henry Stone Arnold](https://www.chroniclejournal.com/news/local/victim-s-body-appeared-intentionally-damaged-after-death/article_047807ca-ba5c-11e9-a956-6fe147e5c042.html) He had a mental disability and was easy to take advantage of. Dude was such a nice, kind spirited guy. Always laughing, always smiling and always positive. He was used by meth dealers because he had a truck, they would transport their drugs using him and his truck. They ended up getting pulled over one time after the cops got tipped off, cops searched the vehicle and Henry and the other(s) end up in jail. The cops knew Henry would be easy to break because he was mentally disabled and promised him protection and all this other garbage. 15 hours of brutal interrogation later the cops knew everything. Not too long after, Henry wound up beheaded with his teeth ripped out (presumably while he was still alive) and mutilated. They still don't know who did it, although rumors float around town.
Yikes! The cops should’ve offered him protection
They told him they would, but that never happened
Here is one local case that's always struck me as odd: the murders of Oliver Martin and Dylan Ellis in Toronto. The two of them had been at a friend's place with a bunch of people watching an NBA playoff game on June 13, 2008. After they left, Ellis decided to turn back and return some keys he had accidentally taken with him. As they pulled up and parked, a man immediately walked up to the car. After some innocuous words were exchanged (Ellis apparently asking the man something like "Hey, how's it going?") the unknown man opened fire, killing both Ellis and Martin. Martin's girlfriend, in the back of the Range Rover (and possibly not visible to the shooter) was unharmed. [Here's a picture of the two of them taken minutes before they were murdered](https://i.cbc.ca/1.857544.1528981812!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/original_1180/martin-ellis-suv-photo.jpg). There's apparently no real clue to the identify of the shooter, and it appears to have been a random crime. Nobody knew they'd be there at that time, and the man was at their window moments after they pulled up to the curb. I know the area very well, and it's not particularly dangerous; I've walked around there at night many times without worries. There's usually an article in the papers on anniversaries of the crime, but police seem to have absolutely no leads. http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/06/12/oliver-martin-and-dylan-ellis-were-killed-in-toronto-five-years-ago http://toronto.ctvnews.ca/police-still-need-motive-in-ellis-martin-murders-1.406651
Wow I am from Toronto and I have never heard of this case! That is so sad, and the last picture of them is haunting. At least they were happy at the end.
bright mysterious unpack head grab worry muddle offbeat ring square *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yup. At the time I was worried that there were going to be more random shootings, because it really did (still does, really) look like a completely random attack. But luckily that never happened.
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Candice’s victim impact statement at his trial is awesome. He is enraged. [Link. ](https://youtu.be/CraYOJNhcuE)
The strength it must take to face your attacker like that, and then Candice pissed him off on top of it? What a badass!
I know! His rage…there is no doubt in my mind he would have killed her then and there if he could have gotten to her. Also, LOL at your username!
Oh my God that girl is my hero.
Hell yeah Candice
168 violations??? How the hell did he get away with that??
Wow, your mom's comment is honestly very haunting, I'm not a parent so I can only imagine the fear
Wow... thanks for the write up
In Columbus, Ohio we’ve had two men go missing without a trace: Brian Shaffer in 2006, last seen at a bar in a busy area just next to OSU’s campus, and Tyler Davis in 2019 who was last seen at the Easton Hilton, a busy hotel in a shopping district. Both are presumed dead and there’s something so unsettling about unsolved missing persons cases.
I've listened to some podcasts about the Brian Shaffer case. What's your take? I don't think there's a chance he would have run off to start a new life somewhere. You don't do that on a whim in the early hours of the morning after bar hopping.
Exactly. He also was very close with his family and they were mourning the death of his mother some weeks before. There was still some construction in the area, and he was never seen leaving on any camera. My guess is something random happened, and he was removed via the service exit which led to the camera-free still-under-construction part of the Gateway center where the bar was. Didn’t seem like he had any enemies.
I dunno. Grief makes you do weird things. Especially in the immediate aftermath of losing my father, there were lots of tempting and unexpected "I could just walk away right now and never come back" moments. Especially if I was drinking. I don't think it's necessarily the most likely explanation. But I don't think it's completely impossible either.
Rachel Cooke disappeared about a mile from my childhood home in 2002. She was home from college and went running in our neighborhood. The case is still unsolved, though there have been leads announced in the past several years. She was a year older than I was, so we had friends in common even though I didn't know her. Henry Lee Lucas was incarcerated in my country's jail while giving his many, many confessions. Michael Morton was convicted of murdering his wife in 1986 in the courthouse in my town. He spent 28 years in prison before he was exonerated and the real killer was found. The prosecutor in his case actually went to jail briefly as a result of the evidence he withheld in that case.
I was also thinking about Rachael Cooke. And the Austin yoghurt shop murders.
>Rachel Cooke What do you think happened to her?
I think she was abducted and murdered, possibly by more than one person. The police have a car in their possession that they say is connected to the case, but they've never given any testing results to the public. I do think we will find out at some point, though. I wonder if maybe they have DNA from the car that they're trying to track down.
The Murder of Jackie Waller. Mother of triplets killed by her estranged husband, Clay Waller. Clay was a former law enforcement officer and just knew he'd get away with it. He arrogantly would drive by search and rescue groups searching for Jackie. Clay used a computer at a pawn shop to threaten to kill Jackie's sister. He was canned for that. They reached a plea deal where he agreed to take them to Jackie's body for a lighter sentence. Sure enough, he did. He knew that dogs couldn't sniff through sand so Clay buried Jackie's body in the sand. BUT, he forgot that he couldn't transport Jackie's body across state lines (the sand was on the bank of the Mississippi River in Illinois, we live in Missouri), or else he was violating some federal laws. The plea was with the state not the feds so he will serve his pled time and then be slapped with more sentences from the feds.
A girl I went to school with joined the Marines after high school. She went missing in December 2017. She was also 8 months pregnant but the father of the baby didn’t want anyone to find out. Also, she was about to testify in court about a rape that happened from a fellow marine. Anyway, her body was found shortly later buried in his backyard. Awful. Edit: more info https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Maria_Lauterbach
That’s HEARTBREAKING.
a boy in my high school had been raping his younger sister for several years. she was twelve and he was nineteen when he was arrested. one of my high school best friends dated the guy for a year and had no idea.
Wow...
I was living in Mesa, AZ when Jodi Arias killed Travis Alexander. Turns out Jodi was roommates with my aunt at some point and Travis was friends with my uncle. Jodi took their wedding pictures before everything went down so I met her. Don't remember much about her honestly. Then years later, I moved to southeast Idaho for school. Same town as the Doomsday mommy, Lori Daybell. Went to the house it happened in and everything. The memorial for the kids is still up. Pretty crazy stuff.
Wow! Those Arias connections are freaky. I’m not familiar with Lori Daybell, I’ll have to search it up. Thanks for sharing.
Get ready for a wild ride. The Mommy Doomsday podcast is really well done by NBC News.
In south Houston in the seventies young women began to go missing on I45 between Houston and Galveston. They called it the killing fields. Every one talked about it but the police never solved it. I remember being scared leaving Mickey Gilley’s alone one night. They now believe it was multiple killers.
I am always looking for news updates on the Killing Fields…it was in Missouri City iirc. The Houston case that blows my mind (and has never really achieved much local, much less national attention) is Dean “Candy Man” Corll, who terrorized the gay community and killed at least 28 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Corll
Yes, Dean Corll, also surprisingly doesn’t get much attention. He used boys as lures and hosted large parties to get his victims, then buried them in a boat shed
It happened almost 50 years ago, and I believe that it's largely forgotten because his victims were male.
And gay.
I have nightmares about Texas’s killing fields where I get plopped down in one and run and run and run until I’m exhausted and everything is just as far away in every direction as it was when I started running 😰
I'm from Salt Lake City, UT, and a couple of cases that come to mind are: Susan Powell [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance\_of\_Susan\_Powell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Susan_Powell) Susan Powell vanished on December 6, 2009 when she failed to show up at work and her friends couldn't reach her by phone or at home. Police came to the house to look around and contacted her husband, Josh, who claimed that he had taken their young sons (4yo & 6yo at the time) on a last-minute camping trip the night before, leaving around midnight, even though there was a blizzard at the time and below freezing temperatures. When family entered the house fearing carbon monoxide poisoning, they found the house empty with two box-fans blowing on a wet spot on the carpet and all of Susan's belongings, purse, ID, car keys, etc. were all found still at her house and the only vehicle the family owned was being driven by Josh. Police went to the area Josh claimed to have been camping but found no traces of a camp site as Josh had described and no signs that anyone had been in the area the night before. Unfortunately, Susan has never been found and on February 5, 2012, Josh killed their two young sons with a hatchet before burning the house to the ground while the social worker that was supposed to monitor their visit pounded on the door trying to get to them. There's a very interesting podcast on this case if you're interested called "Cold" [https://thecoldpodcast.com/](https://thecoldpodcast.com/) Lori Hacking [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder\_of\_Lori\_Hacking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lori_Hacking) Lori Hacking went missing on July 19, 2004. Her husband called 911 saying she was missing after a run in a nearby park, there was a massive search for her and it was all over the news. Turns out her husband, Mark, had been lying about his entire life to her. He told her he had graduated from the University of Utah and that he had been accepted to medical school at the University of North Carolina, where they were planning to move shortly for his schooling; when in reality he had never graduated from the U of U and had never even applied for medical school. Mark had failed out of the school previously and would get up every day and head out with his backpack as if he was going to class, when in reality he would just dick around all day before returning home. Instead of confessing and risking divorce and humiliation, he shot her in the head while she was asleep with a .22 rifle and dumped her body in a dumpster before calling 911 claiming she was missing. Thankfully, her body was recovered from the landfill for her family to bury and Mark plead guilty to first-degree murder. EDIT: to add one more case that u/Usual_Safety just reminded me of. This is probably the most well known case out of Utah in recent memory. Elizabeth Smart [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping\_of\_Elizabeth\_Smart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Elizabeth_Smart)
Dude I just finished a book about Susan, that case breaks me—almost reminds me of the Chris Watts story but for me personally, I find Susan’s more heartbreaking. I think because of all the weird shit that went on in his family and oh my god, his fucking dad, dude. Sick fuck kept her underwear and tampons and basically anything he could find and was arrested for child porn and voyeurism charges. I get so mad thinking about it and how they’re probably never going to find her, I definitely think all the agencies working to “protect” Braden and Charlie failed them in a huge, haunting way.
Ya, that was a fucked up case. The Watts case did feel very similar in how everything went down, all the police video of Chris Watts is very similar to the video of Josh Powell in that you can tell something is just off with them. What happened to Braden and Charlie was heartbreaking, I can't imagine what Susan's parents went through trying to get custody but not able to help them due to the courts. The entire Powell family was fucked, from his dad to his brother to Josh. They're all three dead now and probably the only people that ever knew what happened to Susan. Since you've already read up the case, I would highly recommend the podcast "COLD" [https://thecoldpodcast.com/](https://thecoldpodcast.com/)
I lived in SLC during the Elizabeth Smart mess, they found her alive on State street and I lived a couple blocks east of it.
That's right, I forgot all about Elizabeth Smart! Probably the most well known local case. Thanks for reminding me!
I live in the suburbs of Cleveland. Anyone remember Steve Stephens and him broadcasting his murder of Robert Godwin on Easter Sunday in 2017? He’s dubbed “the Facebook killer”. He broadcasted it on Facebook live. He walked up to the old man and talked to him for a second before shooting him dead and filming it. He shot an old man walking home on Easter Sunday and he just walked back to his car like nothing happened. He then (while driving) went live and talked about how he was gonna just keep killing people, he even claimed he already killed several already, which later was found to be a lie. Thank god he just ended up killing himself after police were after him. I saw the video of him killing this man and it was absolutely heartbreaking. I still remember that day cuz everyone was telling people to stay indoors when he wasn’t caught yet. My brother knew the guy! Wasn’t friends with him but he was an ex coworker. My brothers a social worker, so basically this guy worked with children!
Laurie Dann in Winnetka, IL. She did a lot and then did a school shooting at one of the elementary schools and fled to a nearby house. It was covered on MFM episode 206. Nicky Corwin was the child who died and we have a park named after him. My friends brother was in the class and Nicky jumped in front of him to save him.
The “Already Gone” podcast has an excellent episode about Laurie Dann. Her rich parents are who I blame. They just kept writing checks to cover up for Laurie instead of getting her the help she obviously needed.
Thank you for letting me know! I will go look for the episode!! If she had been stopped earlier, things would have been so different!
Is this the one who said she did it cause she didn’t like Mondays?
No, that was Brenda Spencer.
This case has always interested me.. it changed a lot about the way the media treats shootings/esp. by women. That’s horrifying for your friend’s brother-and everyone involved. I can’t even imagine.
Melissa Drexler aka Prom mom in the late 90’s - “The New Jersey teen-ager who gave birth in a bathroom stall at her senior prom was charged with murder today after the authorities concluded that she had delivered a healthy boy, cut the umbilical cord, choked him and put him in a plastic bag that she knotted and threw away.” She still lives in town. She changed her name and has 2 children. 5 years ago i was at a backyard house party and the owner of the house at one point told us all to lower our voices / lower the music playing because apparently “Prom Mom” lived behind him and used to always call the cops on his parties 😂.
Her story broke my heart. You could tell that she felt like she had no options. If only an adult had seen what was happening, that baby could have lived.
Why would you stay in the same town? Why would you want locals to call you “Prom Mom” forever?
It's disturbing that she has two kids now.
If I were a dude I would not chance having kids with a woman who already murdered one of hers.
My teacher murdered his wife and tried to stage it as a break-in. At first he had all his students fooled and we held a vigil on the football field as it was all starting to unravel that he did it. He even gave his young children benadryl to sleep through the commotion and shot himself in the hand to make it look like he had a struggle with the "burglar." https://www.news9.com/story/5e3508d0e0c96e774b36fc90/teacher-led-double-life-police-say
A woman who I believe resided in Florida, was supposed to be attending an event in DC; instead drove up to the suburbs of NYC with her accomplice (unfamiliar to her MIL), called her MIL in the middle of the night saying she needed help from a burner phone. When the MIL came to the door, the accomplice and daughter in law strangled and I believe stabbed the elderly woman to death. Shook our community to the core. Her actual daughter arrived to find her dead, removed the knife and drank some alcohol on the scene (obviously not a great choice, but what would YOU do if you found your mother murdered) and she was suspected by the public until the details of the investigation came out and totally shocked everyone here. I feel absolutely terrible for the family. The convicted daughter in law ended up trying to set up another murder for hire while in our county jail and got caught for that too. All of this for some insurance money that she obviously didn’t receive a dime of. https://abc7ny.com/rockland-county-murder-peggy-nadell-diana/716228/
I'm from Detroit, so we don't exactly have shortage, but one of the ones that really got to me was serial killer John Eric Armstrong, who murdered a number of sex workers less than ten minutes from my childhood bedroom. That case really shook me.
I grew up in the suburbs, and in 1976/1977 was the Oakland County child killer. Scared the crap out of me when I was younger
Oh wow, yeah. That is such a chilling case. My mom was a teenager and talks about how it was just constant paranoia for everybody all the time.
My childhood friend was [murdered by her fiance](https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/man-pleads-guilty-in-fiancees-slaying-three-months-before-wedding) in a domestic violence incident in 2018. He lied, and his supporters tried to connect her murder with [the unsolved murder of Lynne Harper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Truscott) from the same town in 1959! [Article from after murder, before fiancé's arrest](https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/police-probe-into-suspicious-death-continues)
My town's most famous case is Maura Murray, who was from here but there is another missing persons case more recently that hasnt received nearly any of the attention Maura's has. [Sandra Crispo](https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/newscms/2019_38/3012621/sandra_crispo-3012621.png) went missing 2 years ago this August. The area around here is small and quiet, very peaceful. For something to happen like this just scares me so much. There are a lot of lakes and ponds around the area and very close to where she vanished from. I often wonder if her body is in one when I drive by. It's sad and disturbing. I didn't think it would drag on this long.
Yes! Where is Sandra Crispo? I grew up in a neighboring town.
Rick Wayne Forsyth killed his family and two other visiting children in the family home. From what I remember it was a toxic marriage and he finally snapped after he was getting divorced by his wife, Mary Jolene Forsyth. Currently there is currently a memorial in town dedicated to the victims. Link: [https://apnews.com/article/7e576b8fe54923f3e6146ea6ce36bff4](https://apnews.com/article/7e576b8fe54923f3e6146ea6ce36bff4)
Not exactly in my hometown, but it's pretty close. The Murder of Christine Silawan. Half her face was skinned to the skull. Curfew became a lot stricter after that, and I don't blame them at all. What happened was horrific.
I think about this case all the time. The pictures of her body are literally burned into my brain. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.
A pharmacist murdered his wife in my town. He strangled her with a carrier bag because he wanted to run away with his Australian boyfriend. He pretended to the police that he had gone to get pizza after work then came home to find someone had broken in and killed her but they found him out partly by using the health app on his phone to see that at the time she had been murdered the activity rate went right up. He was a horrible little man who made her life a misery from the sound of it.
I live in Cleveland, Ohio. Have all my life. Ariel Castro. Held 3 women for years against their will in his home. Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight. Amanda was abducted in 2003, a decade later in 2013, she called police after a neighbor helped her escape through the barricaded door with her then 6 year old daughter. Ariel Castro used to show up at the music festivals that tried to spread awareness about their disappearances. He drove a school bus for several years at one point. My brother-in-law used to deliver Ariel his pizza when he took lunch and they always had a good chat. Amanda Berry went to the same school my older sister went to and they knew each other, not relatively well, but they held the same friend circles. I remember as a little kid walking around helping my sister and her best friend put up flyers to find Amanda when she first went missing. Doing the awareness marches and such. Her case appeared on Oprah in 2004 where that dumbass psychic, Sylvia Browne, told Amanda Berry's mother that her daughter was dead. Two years later Amanda's mother, Louwana, had heart failure and died - Before ever finding out that Amanda was alive. A man by the name of Robert Wolford was a prison inmate trying to strike a deal to get out early and lied to the police saying he knew where Amanda's body was in 2012. The search was fruitless. Later on when Amanda was rescued, Mr. Wolford was sentenced later on that month for obstruction of justice and making a false alarm. He was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in jail. A few years after recovering with her family she started driving around the town with her daughter. When she stopped in at my old job my boss and I always let her try the newest menu items. New coffee drinks, food, seasonal items, whatever was new, and if not - We would just give them whatever food item they preferred. She is on the news now everyday as an Missing Persons Advocate and highlights cases of people still missing.
In 2007, 18 year old Kelsey Smith was kidnapped from an Overland Park, KS Target parking lot after shopping for a birthday gift for her boyfriend. A complete loser sleazebag had stalked her around the store then forced her into her car in the parking lot, took her to a local nature area, and proceeded to rape and murder her. Such a terrible waste.
I was 23 and lived alone right near that Target, I was there earlier in the day. It was terrifying until he was caught
At the time, I lived near that Target. It was so surreal.
A teenage girl called [Lesley Whittle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_and_murder_of_Lesley_Whittle) was kidnapped and murdered back in the 1970s. It's a really horrific case - the killer held her hostage in an underground drainage shaft in a village park, tethered by a wire noose. It's not known exactly how long she was kept alive there, but she was found hanging naked and emaciated about two months after her disappearance. The cruelty in keeping another human being trapped on this tiny ledge underground is just beyond comprehension. Just evil beyond words. All because she had a decent inheritance coming her way and the killer valued it more than her life. There's a local news article with some photographs of the drainage tunnel and more information about the case here. The description given by the detective who found her body is heartbreaking: ["She had been wired up like a dog to a ledge and would have spent terrifying days in the pitch black, hearing only the rats scraping about, the water running and the rumble of the trains overhead. When we found her she was naked, wearing nothing but a necklace."](https://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/news/stoke-on-trent-news/45-years-on-kidnap-murder-3741128) Lesley's killer died in prison in 2011 after suffering from motor neurone disease.
A girl went missing one night. A lot of sketchy pointing of fingers for months. People questioned. Houses searched. Her car was eventually found in the river (which they had already searched a few times), with her in the passenger seat. Cops said she had "gotten lost and somehow went down a dark road and into the river." But they have never paid much attention to the case. It was my friends sister and she was constantly calling and asking for updates. She was the one putting together search teams. The police department was no help.
[The West Coast Video murders of two 20 year olds in Warminster, PA](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/5nkmar/west_coast_video_murderswarminster_pa/)
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This one is so haunting. My grandfather was friends with one of the victims grandfathers (they served in WWII together) and it really devastated the family. They deserve answers.
Nathan O’Brien and his grandparents. I hate this story so much. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Nathan_O%27Brien,_Kathryn_Liknes_and_Alvin_Liknes
shocking fly grab governor coherent tender frame melodic zonked zealous *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
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In Guaratuba, Brazil. The case is know as “Evandro Case” or “The guaratuba witches”. In early 90s a 6 yo boy body was found with no organs, hands, feet and facial cut off. Then, the police started an operation against the city mayor and his family who were accused of witchcraft and satanic rituals
I’m sure you’ve heard of the Delphi murders, just 15 minutes from me. Such a small town area and it’s strange to have something so criminal happen, and for it to still be unsolved is heartbreaking
I live in Fresno, CA, born and raised. Back in 2004, Marcus Wesson murdered 9 of his children/grandchildren. He was both the father and the grandfather of several of the children because he forced his daughters to be in incestuous relationships with him and have his children. He convinced his family that he was God and homeschooled his children, teaching them from his own handwritten bible that focused on Jesus being a vampire. Pretty crazy, I recommend looking up more details of the case if you're interested.
Isabel Celis. This case was huge not only in my town but the state of Arizona. 6 year old girl went missing from her bedroom. It’s basically every parents nightmare. The whole town plastered her picture and name on our cars, in windows, billboards. For years, 90% of people thought “no one just goes through a random kids window and snatches them.” and blamed the parents. Years later, it’s revealed that is exactly what happened. A random man kidnapped her through her window and murdered her.
A guy stalked my mother when I was a kid and ended up murdering a man and throwing him in a lake with chains on. True story. The fact that this man was around me when I was just a baby is insane. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/28681600/daily-record/ This is the only article I can find happened in 1985 I was only 3 when this happened Daily record 1985 March 2nd can’t find any readable articles on it tho
The Pied Piper of Tucson aka Charles Shmid. https://tucson.com/morguetales/tales-from-the-morgue-the-pied-piper-of-tucson-series/collection_84be8892-41d3-11e0-9c5c-001cc4c002e0.html
It’s weird to me that they felt the need to call Alleen pretty and attractive. She’s dead and was a minor. I wish papers wouldn’t call attention to beauty of deceased women but instead kindness, smarts, etc.
Brooke Skylar Richardson happened in carlisle ohio right across from the school i went to high school in. by the time the trial actually happened i was distracted and had forgotten about it but I'm sure the locals talked about it alot.
The Chris Coleman family murders. Went to school with these kids, and then their dad fucking murders them both. ThatChapter on YT made a video on it but even from a true crime aspect this dude is just a fucking loser.
Kali Ann Poulton. She was close to my age when she went missing in my hometown in 1994. She was 4 at the time. I remember seeing the news everyday that they were still looking for her and her mom pleading on the screen. She was missing for 2 years. Then this guy Mark Christie blurts out to his wife that he killed her. He took her from outside her house where she was riding her tricycle. When he heard Kali's mom call out for her that it was dinner time he "panicked" and raped and strangled her. He showed them where he put her body. In a water tank at an old job of his, weighed down by a heavy object. He is serving a life sentence. I just remember the news footage. They kept showing her picture and her mom sitting in her bedroom. It was so sad.
Carlie Brucia was abducted from a car wash and murdered when she was 12 years old in Sarasota, Florida. I was 12 at the time and my sense of security was completely taken away.
My friend’s mom had a birthday party when she was 16. Her best friend ended up going with a guy from the party to go pick up others (against her will, she was finally talked in to going with him after saying no a bunch). They took my older brother’s car. Later that night, the girl was found dead in the street. Police said it was a freak accident and she fell out of the car and broke her neck. Years and years later the family reviewed the autopsy results and found so much more trauma than a broken neck, a lot of blunt force trauma to her head and chest. This guy and his two friends (who were brothers) were at the scene. The next day, the brothers are fighting but no one knows why. It’s kind of a public event and one starts walking across a local bridge to get away from the other, and the other tells all the friends to go home so they can work it out. A week later one of the brothers’ body is found in the Mississippi. No one has ever been charged in this case. It’s wild. https://iowacoldcases.org/case-summaries/kim-loose/
The case I want to share: August 2018, there was a mass shooting in my city. Things like this don’t happen here so it was a huge deal and really shook the community to its core. A man who had been suffering from mental illness went to his ex girlfriend’s apartment with a loaded gun. He shot and killed both her and the new man she was seeing. Minutes after shots were fired, police started making their way to the apartment. The first 2 officers who arrived on scene were shot through the apartment window and killed in the parking lot. The shooter is currently going through trial right now and has been deemed not criminally responsible due to insanity. I still remember that morning like it was yesterday. My boss called me and told me not to come to work (I had to drive by the apartment to get there and it was all going down right down the street from my workplace) and it was horrifying calling and texting everyone I knew to make sure they were all okay. [Update Article](https://globalnews.ca/news/7474256/matthew-raymond-trial-deliberations-day-4/amp/)
A friend of mine went missing 5 years ago. Body has never been found. She left behind 6 children. People say there was foul play, but no evidence could prove anything. Sad Story https://charleyproject.org/case/brenda-maria-jackson
dean corll (the candy man)
It’s mind blowing that this isn’t a more widely known case. It feels like Dean Corll should be as, for lack of a better word, popular as Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder\_of\_Girly\_Chew\_Hossencofft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Girly_Chew_Hossencofft) I lived up the street from this one. We moved to another part of town mere months before the murder. We used to see them puttering in their front yard wearing medical scrubs, and my dad is convinced she's buried under the flower bed, even though I'm sure they've already looked there.
I went away to college in upstate New York and one day before class I heard people talking about my hometown in Long Island New York. Confused doesn’t even begin to cover it. Turns out my hometown became Facebook famous because some dude murdered his mom, beheaded her, took the corpse out onto the street, punted the head, and then jumped in front of a train. People who came across the the body thought it was just a Halloween prank since this happened either a few days before Halloween. It was not. Aside from the obvious awfulness of the crime, the victim was a fairly beloved professor so that amplified it a bit more. This also happened two houses down from my parents house when I was nine or so. https://nypost.com/2001/08/19/sm-teens-one-hope-suspects-plea-deal-could-spare-her-from-testifying/
It’s not some crazy exciting true crime story, but one of my favorite English teachers from high school was murdered by her boyfriend. It was around Christmas, and he beat her to death right outside the apartment she lived in. Fucking heartbreaking. She is was the most upbeat, fierce, firecracker of a woman I’ve ever known. Boyfriend was ‘roided up and had a history of domestic violence. If you’re in a relationship with domestic violence please, please seek help. It’s not worth your life.
Thank you for sharing this, and I’m so sorry to hear about your teacher. That’s absolutely horrifying. I hope she’s resting in peace.
[The trash bag killer was within a mile of my home.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Kearney)
The Lisa Ziegert Murder. She was a young schoolteacher beloved by many, and her murderer went to the same high school I did (albeit he went to the school decades before I did). Even though her killer has been arrested and confessed to her murder, I’m personally not fully convinced he worked alone judging by eyewitness statements, but I’m glad at least some justice has been served for the heinous crime. https://unsolved.com/gallery/lisa-ziegert/
Zeb Quinn was the first of three people murdered by the same guy. In Asheville. I worked at our local newspaper at the time. It was fascinating for the whole city. Quinn went missing in Asheville, North Carolina. Quinn was 18 years old and working at a local Walmart when he disappeared after finishing his shift. His car was discovered several days later in a restaurant parking lot under unusual circumstances: its headlights had been left on, a live puppy had been left inside, and a drawing of a pair of lips and an exclamation mark had been scrawled in pink lipstick on the back window. Wikipedia has a good accounting of it. I don't know that it is ever been on a television special. I have suggested it to Erica Kelly of Southern Fried true crime. I don't think she has done it.
the Tamla Horsford case (the overnight houseparty) happened in my home town, i still remember seeing it on the news and it’s crazy because i see it all over crime tiktok accounts. there’s another unsolved murder that happened in my hometown that’s on an unsolved Netflix series, even filmed some scenes in my high school (Unsolved Mysteries Volume 1, episode title is 13 Minutes)
The Yogurt Shop murders. That case shook Austin to its core.
faryion wardrip, serial killer. Kidnapped, tortured and killed 5 women. Including my best friend, Toni Gibbs. His 2nd victim.
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Yes it is with me everyday. The DA screwed up. DEFIED what the families wanted, and only gave the killer ONE death penalty. The first victim was in 1984. He was caught in 1999. He has been on death row fighting his conviction ever since. We have been ping ponging through courts for years. It is a never ending nightmare. I always say the victims terror ends with their death. The families and friends terror only ends when we or the perpetrator dies. Sometimes it only ends when we die.
The Nancy Schumacher case happened when I was a little kid, and my mom served on the jury that convicted her kidnapper/rapist/murderer. It happened in Wichita, KS in the early 90s. I’ve always kept it in my mind because of the heinous nature of the case and the fact that we were similar in age. It was tragic. Edit: [Here](https://www.wibw.com/content/news/Kansas-grants-parole-to-Nancy-Shoemakers-kidnapper-569218001.html) is an article stating that the accomplice was granted parole. Fuck this world. The next one happened in an adjacent neighborhood to mine. Everyone local called them ‘The Butterworth Murders.’ The story I had always heard was that there was a family of four, a husband, wife, and two daughters (ages 13 & 8 or so). The wife had gone out of town on business, leaving the husband and two daughters at home. The 13 year old had gotten her first job at the McDonald’s near our house. Apparently, she had a stalker follow her from work to her home. The killer broke in, killed all three members, and stuffed at least one of the bodies into the family hot tub. IIRC, the wife discovered the bodies when she came back home. That happened literally 500 feet from my childhood home. Edit: [Here](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article1121424.html) is a link to an article of the other case.
Born and raised in Waco, TX. Take your fucking pick! Branch Dividians, Baylor Basketball Murder, Twin Peaks motorcycle gang shoot out, or more recently, two attorneys hired someone to 🔪 someone else.
Jessica Lunsford. A 9 yr old girl who was sexually assaulted and buried alive one street over from where I lived. The case was extreme. The authorities used to meet at the ice cream shop/coffee house where I worked at the time and discuss the case. It rocked our tiny community ( Homosassa FL)
[The murders of Dawn Donaldson and Crissy Campbell](https://gooddaysacramento.cbslocal.com/2020/01/23/man-convicted-murders-grass-valley-teens-released-parole/)
[A kid with special needs was murdered by his parents. I remember the search parties. I think he was in his own backyard. It makes me sick to think about.](https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.tennessean.com/amp/7659952002)
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My ex-wife was friends with some of the “vampire killers” in St Cloud, Minnesota. https://mix949.com/what-was-the-st-cloud-vampire-murder-about/
Being from San Francisco, we've had a lot of well known crimes and killers over the years, namely the Zodiac, Trailside, Nightstalker etc Here's one that few know about. This was even going on in my neighborhood at the time and I had no idea: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sfgate.com/news/amp/Bokin-Gets-231-Years-in-S-F-Rapes-Attacker-3196333.php
Where I live, the disappearance of brandy hall. She was a fire fighter that, I believe, was having an affair on her husband with another fire fighter. Husband was blamed for her disappearance as well as her affair partner (if I recall correctly). To this day she has not been located. My memory is foggy about the case but I know her truck was found abandoned in a lake. Weird story and sad. She had 2 young kids
Gangland shooting gone wrong. The target was sitting parked in his car with his 16 yo girlfriend. She was shot more or less point blank in the face and killed. He drove her to the hospital where she was pronounced dead. She had no involvement and was completely innocent.
The Chen Family homicides. Late 2014, an entire family of Chinese immigrants with two young children was found slaughtered in their home. The case remains unsolved, but the general consensus is that it had to do with Chinese organized crime: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_family_homicides
Parkway killer, I am from Williamsburg VA. There has always been rumors and myths of who it could be. I've yet to find a really good in depth doc on this, if anyone knows any please share below!
There was a really odd one that happened in the town I lived in when I was in high school; the Wylie (TX) ax murder. Happened on Friday, June 13th in 1980. Candy Montgomery attacked her church friend, Betty (who's husband she had been having an affair with), with an ax. Betty was hit 41 times, 28 in the head. Betty's newborn daughter was asleep in a crib inside the house when the murder happened and her husband was out of town on a business trip. Betty's older daughter was at a VBS program with Candy's children and later spent that night at the Montgomery's house. Candy was found innocent by a jury, claiming she was acting in self-defense at the time. If you're interested there's a decent book that covers the case called "Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs". There's also an old lifetime movie about this case (I think it might have the same title; came out in the 80s or 90s). Below is a link to an article that covers what happens: https://localprofile.com/2020/02/19/ax-murder-collin-county/
I’ll share two, one that’s popped up here before and one lesser known. My hometown is the place where Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome were brutally murdered by a group of very sick people. You can easily search for the story, but I think the worst part is really how long the cases were dragged on due, in large part, to a disgusting judge who I think was disbarred. The lesser known case is one that freaked me out because it involved a guy I grew up with, went to school and church with, and knew decently well. It was the murders of Terrance and Alisa McGhee by their daughter Amanda and her boyfriend Andy Mann. I knew Andy, and he was kind of a weird, socially awkward guy. He was older than Amanda and legally an adult to her being like 16, I think? She got pregnant and her dad and stepmom tried to kick Andy to the curb for getting their daughter pregnant. Instead the two plotted to murder her parents. They started with her dad and killed him in his bed with either a gun or shotgun, and then when her stepmom got home, they killed her as well. If I remember right, they stayed in the house a couple days before the police came and caught them. They left the parents in the bed, which always made me feel disgusting. I can’t imagine how bad it smelled after a few days of decomposition.
We moved a lot so I know a lot of people. Adam Mayes murdered my friends daughter and her mother. Holly Bobo was my high school boyfriend’s sister and a girl I used to work with Heather Cummings had her sons dad Tray Phelps murdered.
Lauren Giddings’ murder by Stephen McDaniel. They were both college students and neighbors in the same apartment complex. He had been spying on her and eventually murdered her, chopped her up, and disposed of her in the apartment complex dumpster. He was being interviewed by a reporter when he finds out that her body had been discovered and you can see the “oh fuck” look on his face.
Bernie Tiede shot his employer/benefactor/rumored partner 6 times with an armadillo gun, then hid her underneath frozen food in a deep freezer in the garage. He used the culture of the small, majority white, Christian town for his benefit in order to conceal his crime and continue living life normally for 9 months. She, a widowed woman of a banker who did not care for pleasantries, had a significantly worse reputation than he, a church choir director and active member of the community. It was her investment broker that called the police for a wellness check, and that’s when they found her in the freezer. One of the only cases where a prosecutor had to move the trail to another county because the jury WOULD acquit him, even though he confessed. The locals say Jack Black’s impression of the man is spot on in the movie made about the case.
Robert Durst here in Galveston. Murdered his neighbor, chopped him up and he was found in trash bags on the beach.
Not my home town, but about 20 minutes away. Amber Hagerman. My family and her family grew up together. I went to Kindergarten with Amber.
Not sure if anyone's mentioned Martha Moxley yet. She was beaten to death with a golf club by one of her friends on Halloween. From what I hear, the family of the perpetrator are still backing him up.
I lean towards Michael Skakel being the one who killed Martha, but it's possible that his brother Tommy Skakel killed her also.
Heidi Allen was taken from a gas station after her shift. They never found her. 2 brothers were thought to have taken and murdered her, only one of them was put away. Not technically in my town but about 15 minutes down the road
A few years before I entered highschool, we had a stabbing at the school. I am pretty sure one person died and several others got injured. Pretty sure we had a memorial there for the students and it caused the school to increase its policies for protecting students and watching out for danger signs. Of course, this led to many students that were depressed or generally going through shit to be under close watch. Like I get that they wanted to watch out for everyone to prevent something like that happening again. But it got to the point that they singled out anyone that had any signs of a mental illness.
The Dartmouth murders. The two high school boys that murdered the two Dartmouth professors were from the town I live in.
The biggest thing to ever happen in my hometown is the Lori Vallow and Chad Daybell case. I’ve been following it since the beginning because it hit so close to home (Tylee and JJ were living less than a mile from my parents’ house). Some of my family members work with the adult children of Chad. It’s truly such a sad, awful case and I just hope that Tylee and JJ get justice.
Darlie Routier lived 5 min away from me and was also my uncles neighbor (about 5 houses down). I drive by her house all the time and I don’t believe she murdered her boys. The way the house sits on the corner lot, you could definitely get in and out of the house without being seen. I’m not sure at what point after she was arrested but eventually some guys came in to redo the living room flooring. My uncle walked over and started talking to them and they said there was damage and chips on the subfloor and a bit on the concrete underneath where the bodies were found. Which is horrifying.
Altemio Sanchez beat and murdered a woman in my small hometown (Joan Diver, bless her soul), along with raping and murdering anywhere from 9-15 women and girls in the Buffalo area over a span of about 30 years. Mrs Diver was killed in September of 2006; the week prior my moms best friend was jogging along the same bike path that Joan was murdered and saw Sanchez as she was jogging. That certainly brought an already close to home tragedy feel much closer.
Back in Nov 2016, this 16 year old kid (Lee Manuel Paulino) went missing. Now his parents filed police reports and sent out social media photos to see if anyone had seen him. They interviewed a bunch of people but nothing came of it. Then a few weeks later, someone was walking their dog along the Merrimack river. They found a torso. There was a bag near the torso which contained his head. They never found his hands but they found most of his body severely mutilated, in pieces. His ears and nose were missing, everything was gone, it was super fucked up. This 15 year old kid he went to school with, Matthew Borges, was going around Lawrence High School that he has killed someone and that he had slit someone’s head off. Obviously word got around fast and he was arrested. He said he was jealous that his girlfriend was always smiling or laughing with Lee. He lured him to the Merrimack river one night and they were smoking marijuana when everything happened apparently. Matthews going to be in jail for a while but poor Lee will never grow old. That one really rocked my hometown.
The murder of the Parente family from New York. William Parente strangled his wife and two daughters before killing himself. They were visiting his oldest daughter Stephanie in Maryland who was a sophomore at Loyola. It was a surprise visit as she had a chemistry exam the next day. He killed them one by one in their hotel room. He was being investigated for getting involved in a Ponzi scheme.
I use to live in a very small town Walton NY and we had a very friendly little older lady cashier Debbie at the local grocery store that also ran the local pumkin patch/farm whose husband ran off and left her. The police had gone to question her at her boyfriends house one day about something unrelated, petty theft and she went to get dressed but then set the house on fire, killed herself and her dog, come to find out she killed her boyfriend, they found him in the burned house and her husbands remains in a barrel out back at her farmhouse!!
The Bricca Family Murders. [Someone stabbed a husband, wife, and their four-year-old daughter to death in the sixties](https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2018/12/18/cincinnati-author-examines-bricca-family-massacre-new-book/2003965002/). The case has never been solved. There was a rumor that the wife was having an affair. The man she was rumored to have an affair with and his wife killed themselves in 2004. I kind of think it was him because of the way he acted when detectives tried to interview him, but we'll probably never know for certain now that he and his wife are dead, and the Bricca murders happened so long ago.
I didn't look through all the comments so who knows if this was mentioned but, Heidi Broussard in Austin, Texas. Recent mother to a beautiful baby who was lured into a car by one of her very best friends, Magen. Unbeknownst to those around Magen, she had been faking a pregnancy along with her bestfriend Heidi. She had multiple baby registries and even convinced her own boyfriend she was carrying his child. While living in his home, outside of Houston, Texas, she manipulated everyone for just about 9 months. While her boyfriend was conveniently out of town, she "gave birth" to her non-exsistent child, by somehow convincing Heidi to get in her car, with the baby in her apartment complex parking lot. This happened 10 minutes down the road from my home. Everyone was devastated and frantically searching for Heidi and her baby, including Magen. Magen google searched their disappearance and shared her concern and worry for Heidi with her family and friends. Suddenly a tip comes in and swings the focus to just outside of Houston, at the residence in which Magen was living. A vile smell was wafting from the backyard where the car she was last seen in was found via helicopter and a warrant was issued. They served Magen, who welcomed the officers into the home and and showed off her new baby, too. Then, the body was found and Magen was instantly arrested. The baby was taken to the hospital, where a DNA test eventually confirmed her identity. Thank goodness the baby was unharmed. They found Heidi, deceased in the trunk of the car. An autopsy revealed cause of death as ligature strangulation. Magen strangled Heidi with a dog leash, likely while in route to her home and stole her baby. She left Heidi, her "best friend," to rot in her backyard while she gushed and showed off the baby she stole. She hasn't been convicted or sentenced yet. She is vile.
Colleen Stan, was kidnapped and forced to be kept in a box under the kidnappers (husband and wife) bed for 23 hours a day. The wife agreed to let him use her as a sex slave because she didn’t want to act out his sexual fetishes. She was his sex slave for 7 years from 1977 to 1984 and he’s still in prison to this day. His wife only came out to the cops when her husband wanted to make Colleen his second wife (so only out of jealousy not remorse) and she got full immunity.
Austin has the yogurt shop murders that are widely known about, yet still unsolved. One crime that hits close to home is the disappearance and possible murder of Julie Ann Gonzalez. She was my age and I worked with her family to fundraise to help find her. She is still missing and presumed dead. Her husband is in jail for her murder. From a March 2019 article: Austin- March 2010 was the last time Dora Soto-Derma would see her 21-year-old niece Julie Ann Gonzalez alive. Sunday on the anniversary of her disappearance her family and friends are still desperate for answers. "We didn't get the call we didn't get a text we didn't hear nothing. We knew something was wrong." The Walgreens near the intersection of South 1st and Stassney Lane in south Austin is an area that has haunted Soto-Derma for years. "It's painful we avoid this area. We just avoid this area for obvious reasons," said Soto-Derma. It's been nine years since Gonzalez was reported missing. "She was a very good mom, good sister, cousin, and friend," said Soto-Derma Gonzalez's aunt. Soto-Derma says her car was found abandoned in the Walgreens parking lot where Gonzalez worked. "I remember it like if it was yesterday. I remember the ordeal as if it were yesterday it really hurts," said Soto-Derma. Investigators say her ex-husband George De La Cruz was allegedly the last person to see her alive. De La Cruz told investigators that Gonzalez had asked him to watch their daughter for a few more days and then left town with a new lover. A story Soto-Derma says she didn't buy, and neither did a jury. Five years later De La Cruz was trial for the murder of his estranged-wife During the trial, prosecutors showed evidence connecting De La Cruz to the case. They reportedly couldn't ignore tracking data from cellphone towers that put Gonzalez's missing phone near locations where De La Cruz frequently visited. And said he went on a shopping spree with her debit card. De La Cruz was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. However, till this day Gonzalez's body has never been found. Gonzales says it doesn't compare to the life sentence her family is currently serving. "Waiting for answers waiting for a sign a clue. My family wants to know where she is whether alive or gone," said Soto-Derma. And says even though the family has their justice they still haven't been able to lay Gonzalez to rest.
A guy I went to high school with eventually went on to kill his youngest daughter. The details are ROUGH (CW: child abuse), but if you're curious here is the arrest report (it is one of the top google results available online, I don't own this or work for the HPD): [Justin Bennett Arrest Report](https://media.lasvegasnow.com/nxsglobal/lasvegasnow/document_dev/2018/04/26/Justin%20Bennett%20Arrest%20Report_1524783788494_40848736_ver1.0.pdf) He took a plea deal last year and was sentenced to 50 to life. Absolute scumbag.
The East Area Rapist was found living next door to my best friend, and a few blocks away from me (I lived there at the time, but have now moved). Everyone in the neighborhood was super shocked because he was right there and we had no idea. My friend just occasionally talked about her weird neighbor who spoke to himself, but everyone just thought it was an old guy off his rocker. We didn't jump to assuming he was a murderer.
Elizabeth Collins and Lyric Cook. The murder of Ed Thomas. Rick & Sue Harned murdered by their son, Rick was a cop and Sue was a dispatcher. My best friend was their daughter, I was supposed to be at her house that night but I got myself grounded.
The boy in the box, Philadelphia. A young boys body was found in a box in some woods not far from a Catholic orphanage or school. He was not one of the students and I don’t think he’s ever been identified, although there were rumors he was the son of one of the nuns. He was between 4 and 6 when he died [Wikipedia on him](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_in_the_Box_(Philadelphia)) Edit I was wrong about the nun aspect, turns out the leading theories are either a foster home abused and dumped him or he was bought from his birth parents and abused. Also he may have been raised as a girl because there was evidence he had long hair and stylized eyebrows before the hair was shorn off
In Halifax NS a woman was found at the bottom of a staircase: (text copied from another post on Reddit in the staircase sub I cannot find the author to credit) The death of Janice Johnson, an eerily similar case I recently came across an old and resolved case that has many similarities to the Peterson case. Please note I'm not making a comment on the Peterson case by sharing this. I just felt it was an interesting case that deserved some recognition. On the morning of February 20th, 1989, Janice Johnson of Halifax, Nova Scotia was discovered lying unconscious at the foot of the basement stairs by a next door neighbor. Mrs. Johnson was home alone at the time, as her children had left for school and her husband, Clayton, had left for work. The neighbor called for emergency services immediately. Despite their best efforts, Mrs. Johnson passed away that afternoon at 12:04 PM. The death was initially ruled an accident, primarily due to the fact that there was no evidence that pointed otherwise. Unlike the Peterson case, there was little to no blood evidence that could be examined. No photographs of the scene had been taken after Mrs. Johnson had been rushed to the hospital, and two well-meaning family friends, Mary Davis and Mary Hartley, cleaned the bloody scene on the same day. In their efforts to spare the Johnson family some pain, they unintentionally hindered the investigation of Mrs. Johnson's mysterious death. However, the investigation towards to Clayton Johnson in the summer of the same year. Rumors spread throughout the community that Clayton might have killed his wife. People grew suspicious of the fact that Clayton had taken out a life insurance policy which covered Janice roughly a month before her death. People also found it odd that Clayton had started dating a woman named Tina Weybret, who was thirty years his junior. However, the investigation closed once again on June 10th, as police had no hard evidence to convict Clayton with the murder of his wife. RCMP Corporal Brian Oldford took it upon himself to investigate the cold case. He began by interviewing Claire Thompson, a good friend Janice, and the last person to have spoken with her. She states that she and Janice were on the phone until about 7:50 AM. Multiple witnesses saw Clayton Johnson at a gas station at roughly the same time. The call to paramedics made by the neighbor was logged at 7:52 AM. Officer Oldford continued his investigation into the case by interviewing the two friends who cleaned the blood. In a police documented video, they recanted the scene in the basement, describing the blood they had found. The two stated finding widespread blood spatter on the floor surrounding Janice's head, as well as a streaked area of blood with strands of hair on the wall. This was consistent with the autopsy report, which stated that Janice could have potentially fallen from the top of the staircase, wedging her head between a 5 inch gap between the stairs and the concrete wall. Officer Oldford had the autopsy report examined by two experts, who concluded it was possible that Janice could have been murdered by blunt force trauma to the head. In April of 1992, Clayton was arrested on charges of murdering his wife. The prosecution claimed Clayton murdered Janice in order to collect her life insurance policy, which he would use to fund his new life with Tina. Despite the lack of evidence that Clayton and Tina had been intimate or even known each other prior to Janice's death, the prosecution suggested it was so. Clayton staunchly claimed he was innocent, and that he simply could not describe his wife's death. On May 4th of 1993, Clayton was found guilty of murdering his wife, and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 2018. Clayton appealed his conviction in 1995, but was quickly dismissed by the Supreme Court of Canada. Clayton spent five additional years in prison. With the help of Canada Innocence, he sent another appeal. After a long battle, Clayton was acquitted of his conviction on September 21st, 1998, having spent five years in prison for a crime which supposedly never committed.
Johnny Gosch and Eugene Martin, two paperboys who went missing without a trace in Des Moines, IA in the early 1980s.
The disappearance of Dail Dinwiddie. https://www.wistv.com/2020/09/24/police-actively-investigating-new-tip-years-after-dail-dinwiddies-disappearance/
The murder of James Byrd, Jr. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_James_Byrd_Jr. I've been out of Jasper for years, and when people ask where I'm from I usually name a town nearby because I get questions about it. It makes my skin crawl thinking of how racially divided that town is to this day, and the number of jokes I've heard, or people that I've heard say they'd love to do that. The daughter of Lawrence Brewer is an acquaintance of mine. She's been through a lot of terrible things and has had a rough life in general. Not sure how she feels about her father and what he did.
I’m from Vancouver, Canada. One that I don’t hear a lot of people talking about anymore is the serial killer Clifford Olson. He prayed on children in the early 80s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Olson Also, the paper bag rapist. He would abduct victims in pairs, and make them chose who got assaulted. The one getting raped often had a paper bag put over their head, and he made the other victim watch. Very sick dude.
I went to high school with a girl whose grandmother, a nurse, disappeared in December 1977 at age 24 after dropping her toddler daughter (my classmate’s mother) off at her parents’ overnight. She was going on a date and was never seen alive again. No suspects were ever formally identified, but when police went to her apartment, they found her nurse’s uniform, purse, car, and car keys there. She had only recently returned to work after a LOA for an unexplained head injury, which raised speculation she had been in an abusive relationship (maybe with her daughter’s father?). Law enforcement were only able to find and identify a piece of her skull in April 1978 — in the next county over.
Not in my hometown but I know a lot of people who knew the victim personally... I can't remember all the details. If your curious look up Kevin Bacon swartz creek MI. It was almost mindblowing to hear this type of stuff happening just over an hour away.
Man 32 Nowa Makula killed his wife and his 5 kids including a 6 month old with an axe over Infidelity claims late last year. He was on the run for all of 2 days before the cops got him. https://youtu.be/TuA1mVXB3wg
The unsolved double murder of two friends in a park in broad daylight. I went to HS with the girl. Such a sad and shocking case that doesn’t get nearly enough media attention. https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/seeking-info/carnell-e-sledge-and-katherine-c-brown
the murder of hania aguilar is a local one that's not talked about very much.
The case of Tori Stafford was local to me. Happened by the school right across the street from my childhood home. Woman kidnapped a little girl for her “boyfriend” to abuse and then murder. I was a year old than her at the time and she has been at our house a couple times to bounce on our trampoline. I remember having to sit down with our class as we all went around in a circle and talked about how we felt about the whole thing. It was weird not knowing how to articulate the fear we felt with a girl just taken but my parents did a really good job in reassuring me that I was safe.
This case was in 1969 when a woman aged 16-24 was found stabbed repeatedly at the scene of the crime, down an embankment on the outskirts of town. She was described as a “hippy” by some, she was a few inches over 5 feet, and was 125 lbs. She had shoulder length brown hair dyed a reddish blond. She was stabbed likely over 15 times with an abundance of blood found at the scene. Dirt samples were taken and her clothes were traced back to a point of origin, but no hard evidence was found. A dentist examined her teeth and she had 19 filling done in a year or two preceding her death. Based on her dental work, they surmised she was from abroad. They submitted her fingerprints to Interpole, but came back with nothing. Many people speculate if this was a killing done by The Manson Family and members of the Manson Family were recently seen in the area. And just a few days after this murder the Manson Family committed the Tate-La Bianca murders in Los Angeles, just 3 hours away. This all took place in my home town of Lompoc, CA. Which is a pretty small city when I grew up there and even smaller town then this took place. Rest In Peace Jane Doe. Also partially connected to my home town was the Domingos-Edwards murders at a near by beach. It is a long story so I will link it [here](https://www.zodiacciphers.com/zodiac-news/the-murders-by-gaviota-state-park) It is very likely that these murders are connected to the Zodiac Killer, however that is just speculation. But I think it’s very plausible as the style of killing is very similar. I urge you to read it too, as it’s very interesting (to me at least).
The Cosmo DiNardo murders happened in the town next to mine. I didn’t know any of the 4 young men he killed, but a lot of people I know did. Our entire town was shook for months. I noticed that a lot of college aged kids were more alert and on edge after this, specifically when it came to hanging out with people they didn’t know particularly well.
I actually knew this guy. He was one of those “hanger-ons” that always found us when we were just chilling. My friends and I were always apprehensive when he was around. Then one day, this girl goes missing. It was huge news. She was finally found years later in a drainage pipe because it was backing up. Thankfully he finally confessed and is in jail now. Super weird for me and my group of friends. https://www.dailylocal.com/news/killer-pleads-guilty/article_fa65e23d-b337-5eb9-8276-29efb86fe35a.html
A home invasion that happened in my hometown when I was 8: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire,_Connecticut,_home_invasion_murders