I knew a couple of guys who had been in school with me and later knew around town, one of which had been a police officer for a time, who turned out to be serial killers.
Here, we called it the ‘Gore Murders’ because the main killer was David Gore. This was in a time before serial killers were showing up all over the place and they actually could not be considered true serial killers. Gore kidnapped an Asian lady and her teen daughter and held them at his house, where he raped them and called his cousin, Steve, in to participate. When they finally killed them, they dumped the chopped up bodies into a couple of 55 gallon drums and tossed them into alligator infested drainage canals at the edge of town, where they were discovered.
During the investigation, it turned out that they had apparently done this before, which accounted for some body parts showing up in the same area over the years and Gore, when he had been a cop, had raped a few girls he pulled over.
Gore was a flat slob, while Steve was a nice enough looking guy and Gore was a bit weird in high school, while Steve was more normal and well accepted. With our police department, hiring weird was not unusual because they hired on one officer so big and fat that his uniforms have to be custom made, he wears out the shocks on the drivers side of the cars he drives and he weighs (d) in at close to 400 pounds but he knew the right people to contact to get in.
The we hired this lady cop, who turned out to be as mean as a snake, whose kid later went and did something like rob a bank and no one knew he did it, but when the bank offered this huge reward, she turned him in off duty and sued to collect the reward!
I remembered another one: A few years ago, I guy I went to high school with by the name of Van Patterson, was convicted of being the Lake County Underwear Bandit. He would break into people’s homes at night and cut their underwear off, running off with it. I think he also stole a great deal of underwear from clotheslines and laundry rooms.
The vice principle of my junior high school (and later high school–he actually moved to the high school the same year I did) was arrested for taking pictures and/or video of cheerleaders changing clothes in his bathroom. That made the news! I had actually liked Mr. Conti and had interviewed him for the school newspaper once…
My home-economics teacher from junior high school was an eccentric old woman who always wore a very obvious wig, those awful, frumpy floral-print house dresses, and she smelled kind of funky. After she died, she made the news for being a compulsive hoarder–a rich one, too. Along with the tons of the stuff they found in her house after her death they found lots and lots of money.
That would be Shawn. He had a screwed up leg. Me and Xeqter knew him before he became a moron. In fact, he is in most of my wedding pictures. Didn’t know about any Republic of Texas membership(its possible, I guess), but he was in the KKK. He and his wife got hooked up with the KKK through her Tuperware sales. I remember one of my friends remarking “Oh my God! Our tupperware lady has been arrested for Terrorism! I hope we don’t have an order out!” One of my friends, when asked by the reporters what he thought about the KKK said “I think its an Inbreeder dating service”. Unfortunately, they didn’t air this on the news.
I knew Shawn for years, and kinda lost all respect for him when he got into the white power crap. I stopped associating with him and I kinda hoped he would grow out of it and come to his senses. He didn’t.
Other than Shawn Adams, I used to work with a male nurse at an adolescant psych hospital. He made a coment about getting to see the teenage girls breasts during an exam one time, which everyone who heard it took as a joke(A lot of people who work in such places make some rather in-appropriate jokes from time to time…Its a stressfull job and its a way of not letting it get to you). Years later I was watching some network show about a sting to bust people trying to pick up underage girls on the internet. Heres this guy I worked with being lead out an airport in handcuffs after trying to meet what he thought was a 14 year old girl.
Me and some friends tried a senior prank in high school that made the news. We tried to re-wire the pa so we play a tape during morning announcements, and move the principals office into the bathroom…we came out of the school at 4 am and there were cops as far as the eye could see. My mom saved the newspaper clipping. “HIGH SCHOOL PRANK LEADS TO THE ARREST OF SEVEN”
Let’s see, one of Mrs. Kunilou’s former students (and a frequent baby sitter for us) was convicted of armed robbery and murder.
Another student was killed in the crossfire of a gang shootout.
Another student’s mother decided to set off a bug bomb without turning off the pilot lights on the gas stove and water heater. The resulting explosion took out several houses in that subdivision.
My sister and her husband woke up one morning to find a Hard Copy crew at their front door. It seems his business partner absconded with the company’s funds and left several clients high and dry.
My boss and I mentored at a middle school. Several years later the principal plea-bargained several charges of sexually molesting his students, including some during the time we mentored there.
I got promoted at work and they hired this girl, Suzanne, for my old job. She seemed pretty nice and we all liked her. I’d gone out to lunch with her at least once a week during the time she was there. It turns out, she was dating a guy that worked at one of our larger car dealerships and she wanted his girlfriend out of the picture. She had tried to pay some guy to kill this woman but she was really stupid about it. She sent this guy a letter offering him money to kill this woman. She was at work when the police came to arrest her. She was escorted downstairs by our own security officers and the police read handcuffed her, read her her rights, and led her outside. No one knew what was going on until everything came out on the news and in the papers.
Here is a link to the article printed in our K-State Campus paper.
A high school friend of mine was making fireworks in his basement when something went wrong. The explosion not only nearly vaporized his body (even his skull was in fragments), but it knocked the end wall of the two-story house off and down the hillside and shattered neighbors’ windows. What was left of the house had burned to the ground before the second fire truck arrived.
This doesn’t really count, because I didn’t know anyone personally, but a software company I used to work at had a regional office in Atlanta next door to where one of the higher-profile workplace shootings took place a few years back. I spent a lot of time on the phone setting up counseling for the people traumatized by having armored-vest SWAT officers running through their office with scary-looking weapons, making sure the killer wasn’t hiding among them.
I went to college with Brendan Fraser, and I consider The Mummy Returns to be pretty wrong.
At my high school (Liberal, KS) was a guy named Jermarr Arnold. He was involved in forensics, debate, vocal music, wrestling,drama, and made secretary of state at Boys’ Nation. He was never in trouble (that I knew of, anyway), and we all assumed he’d go on to law school and be quite successful.
I used to go bowling several times a week in high school with a guy named John Proctor “JP” Remsen. He was a quiet kid.
A couple weeks after our league was out, I saw his mug in the newspaper–he had been arrested for the murder of a 14 year old runaway.
Not just a simple murder, either. Remsen ran him through with a knife–then scraped his body clean, acid-washed the remains, and stuffed everything down a sewer. Shortly after he was arrested, his parents were, too. On weapons and explosives charges.
According to Remsen–he stabbed the runaway because the kid had insulted him.
He was a damn fine bowler. He consistently scored over 200, and occasionally above 250.
I’m in property management, and a guy who lived in one of our buildings owed some money to a free-lance landscaper who had done some work for us. When he refused to pay him and ran into the bathroom, the landscaper got his chainsaw and started sawing through the door, chain-sawing the guy’s arm in the process (37 stitches and a cast for the sawed bone). When I told my supervisor about it, she said “No wonder he didn’t do the work at my house today.”
I also knew a copy where the father killed the 3 year old and himself in one of those custody battles that never happen to anyone to know, until they do.
The victim of J.P. Remsen - Tristan Jensen was not a runaway.
They were classmates, J.P. was a bully & was jealous that girls like Tristan.
J.P. attempted to eliminate the competition.
Somebody I worked with got a restraining order for breaking into another worker’s car and leaving flowers and a note. He was later Identified as the person stealing ladies panties from a certain local area. This got him in the paper.
During my second semester as a Freshman in college, I was assigned a lab partner in an introductory engineering course. In May, he was arrested (along with another fellow I knew slightly (small college)) for burning an abandoned fraternity house to the ground after burglarizing it (which he had done in December during first semester). Lesson to be learned from him - if you get drunk enough to do something like that, try not to get drunk enough later on to brag about it…