I went to the same high school as Jerry Rubin.
My great-grandfather opened Cincinnati’s first refrigerator repair shop in the house that Charles Manson was eventually born in.
I’ve got a friend who’s father killed his mother when he was a little kid. Apparently he’s never been caught. I don’t ask him about it much.
Ummmm… I bought a used Men at Work record once.
Anybody ever hear of the Sexton Family of Jackson Twnshp, Stark County, Oh? Everybody in this county has some connection with America’s Most Dysfunctional Family. That is a truly heinous bunch.
I also had a boss who offed his old lady and his own personal self. Strange to have watched him eating lunch just hours before…
Back in the late '80s a friend of mine worked in the band on a cruise ship that ran from L.A. to Mexico. They made a stop here in San Diego every Tuesday, and as I had no classes on Tuesdays, I’d pick him up and we’d go run errands and have lunch.
One day while waiting for him at the Embarcadero, I met this apparently homeless guy who, among many other things, said he’d choked his wife to death when he caught her with another man. (I don’t recall what happened to the other man.) Apparently this guy had already served whatever time he served.
Not long after our high-school graduation, back when disco was popular the first time, one of our cheerleaders got in a big fight with her mother. When she drove away, her mother was still hanging onto the car and was dragged for some distance and seriously injured. (I think she later recovered.)
Back to that cruise ship – I don’t think any heinous crimes happened on it, but there were several deaths. One time a guy fell overboard. They circled for a while, but finally they just moved on, figuring the sharks had got him. Also, once a woman was found dead in a corridor and was stored in a freezer (separated, one hopes, from the food) until they got into port.
I just remembered another one. A few years ago an old man in our church had a bad, bad fight with his stepson and shot him to death. As he (the stepfather) was in his nineties at the time, it was considered that jailing him would do little good. I think he later killed his other stepson.
(Newbie here. Howdy.)
Long ago, an acquaintance of mine from high school murdered his girlfriend, a lady I also knew. At the time I was making woodcrafts for her consignment shop which, unknown to me, was a front for a drug-smuggling operation. Apparently they had a falling out over a pending deal and he stabbed her with a butcher knife some three dozen times, then burned her house to cover the act. The idiot went straight to his old room at his parents’ house and stashed the blood-soaked clothing in his closet. Thanks to police mishandling of the evidence, the best the D.A. could get him was three years’ probation.
Yeah, the Listener articles definitely influenced me too. (cool sidenote: the guy who wrote that article wanted to use my artwork for it, but the Art Dept went with photos instead)
What convinces me, though, is two things:
1)I know people who know David. His friends definitely can’t believe he did it. But his acquaintances have tons of evidence that he’s just slightly strange enough, for the right reasons, to do something like this and pretend he didn’t, then think he’d get away with it.
2)At one stage David claimed, voluntarily, that “if he did do it, he can’t remember it”. And wow, is that ever a ‘cover all your bases’ answer that totally convinced me he knew he’d done it, and was hoping to have an ‘out’ if they found stronger evidence for it.
One of my friends hung out with the Manson gang, before they became “famous”. He said he was hitch-hiking around California, and was picked up by this group of hippies. He stayed with them for a while. He said there was nothing remarkable about them, other than the “lead” hippie (Manson) played really bad music. This same friend also “dated” (read: one night stand) actor Sal Mineo (“Rebel Without a Cause” “Giant”) a few weeks before he was murdered.
Out of respect I won’t go into detail, but the brother of one of my best friends was murdered - stabbed - about 10 years ago. They still haven’t caught the guy. My friend was devastated.
a guy i went to school with, sean,was a bastard from day one
he took his pencil and jabbed a boy’s arm, enough to make him cry.
for several years , i heard nothing.
at the high school we both went to, he brought a gun to school, he went to jail for that.
now he is in jail, awaiting trial, for the death of his girlfriend’s baby. it is alleged that he shook this baby to death
My great-grand father was a revolutionary. Not really a crime but he was seconds away from being hung for it before a genral amnesty was called.
Well, a guy I was in math class with last year was just convicted of murder of a slightly retarded person. I believe the guy even called me a mother****** on the first day of school. What an idiot.
boy, there sure are a lot of petty crimes listed here as “heinous,” you guys must lead a pretty sheltered life.
As my own contribution, a few years back, I met a Japanese guy who was an Aum Shinrikyo member. I don’t know if he was involved in the Tokyo subway poison gas incident, but he was really creepy, and surely was involved in their criminal activities. Go read “The Cult at the End of the World” if you want the details. They were ALL criminals.
Note also that several of these people are pretty close to the victim or perpetrator, and several crimes being listed as unsolved or unpunished. That and the severity of the crime would alter my definition of ‘heinous’. Also, some people may not want to or cannot release too many details, perhaps for fear of retribution or lawsuit, so there may be more to the story than they are letting on.
Well, I actually have two…
Anybody remember the Singer/Swap story? It happened in Marion Utah (about 2 miles from where I grew up) Well, I know the kids involved (There are at least 12 Singer children) And Adam Swap is going to be out on parole this year, I believe. Everybody in town knew Vicki and John Singer and Adam Swap.
For those who don’t know, what happened was, John Singer was shot, by the sheriff (I think). The reason? They kept their children in the house, abused them, didn’t feed them, etc. One child broke away, and in the middle of a winter night walked 4 miles to town barefoot, with only his underwear on and found a sheriff. The police went to take the children away, and an altercation ensued. Anyway, they lived as recluses up on their ranch. Along came Adam Swap, who convinced the whole Singer clan (The widow, Vicki, and sister-in-law Heidi) that justice needed to be served. So what they did was rigged a bomb to go off in the Stake Center (the Church) during a Tuesday Night Priesthood meeting. For some reason, the Priesthood meeting was canceled. My grandfather, uncles, friends’ fathers, teachers, would have died had they shown up that night. After the bomb went off, the entire interior of the church was destroyed. What followed was a long seige (Detailed in a movie) that eventually ended with the death of two more police officers.
Like I said, Adam Swap will be out on parole, but Vicki and Heidi never went to prison, and they still have all the kids.
The other one…
I had two really good friends, and both of them had older sisters who were also friends. (We’ll call the older sisters “Amanda” and “Jen”) Well, Amanda had a BF, who left her for another girl, we’ll call “Tracy”. So, in order to get Amanda’s BF back, Jen and Amanda hatched a plan. First, they took Tracy up to Wyoming. Then they poured battery acid down her throat, then they stabbed her, then they burned her, then they hid her body. When the authorities found her, she was almost beyond recgonition. It came as quite a shock to everyone in my small town. I was especially shocked since I knew the girls and the victim.
I’m not sure what happened to the girls who did this. As far as I know, they are still in prison.
I went to a small college in western Illinois, and was friends with this guy (not very close, but had a lot of mutual friends, played cards with him a few times). He was involved in a lot of music stuff, and to make money he gave music lessons to a variety of young kids, 9-12 year olds mostly. Evidently, he gave more than music lessons to some of the boys—last I heard, he was convicted of several counts of child molestation and was serving time.
I was a bit startled, but not really surprised; he’d made more than a few unsubtle passes at me, and at the time I was only just barely of age myself, and looked quite a bit younger. Good to know that the slightly creepy vibe I always got from him was justified.
In the summer of 1972, I was working for Houston Lighting And Power Co as a sledgehammer/survey stake carrier
(official title; “Grunt”)after completing my freshman year in music school. My bass teacher called and told me about an opera that was going to be performed and they needed a bassist. He explained that it didn’t pay anything but it was a place to play some serious music during the summer. If I was interested I should call Herf Applewhite at the First Unitarian Church. So I did and had to meet and talk with Herf. Herf was a quite spoken man and talked to me about all sorts of things that were being taught at his … I don’t know what he called it… institute? … whatever it was it wasn’t connected with the church, he was just using the facilities and they weren’t bothering him if it didn’t quite go along with the church’s official position. Anyway, the things he spoke about didn’t go along with any traditional Christian teachings I knew of but since I didn’t know anything at all about the Unitarian Church I didn’t question it. Besides, I was there to play an opera and I wan’t going to join the Unitarian Church or whatever strange idea it was that Herf was plugging. My interest was strictly musical.
Well, the summer got busy, the strain of working as a sledgehammer carrier by day and rehearsing an odd opera (odd for me then … it was Curlew River by Benjamin Britten. Not all that odd by my standards today) at night along with the incredibly low standard of musicianship of the group added up to me dropping out before the first of two performances of the opera. I never went back to the church and I never saw Herf in person again. However, about 10 years later he showed up in the news, arrested in Oregon for convincing some locals that he was an alien from another galaxy. They could join him and his fellow aliens but in order to do that they had to relinquish all their Earthly assets to him so he could continue his mission on Earth. Several people signed over farms and businesses to him. He was caught, arrested and exposed as a fraud. It made the front page of the newspapers here in Houston because we had a history with Herf. A lot of people wondered how anyone could be fooled by Herf’s scam but those of us who had dealings with him just shook our heads and spoke jokingly about “your friend, Herf Applewhite”.
Didn’t hear of him again again until the Hale-Bopp Comet started making the news. Next thing you know, a group of nuts called Heaven’s Gate commits mass suicide to go to the mothership from another planet that is following the comet and the leader of the group is Herf Marshall Applewhite. By this time he was going by his middle name. While a lot of people wonder how ANYONE could believe that there was a spaceship following a comet and in order to get on it you had to leave your physical body on Earth, those of us who knew him just shook our heads and spoke jokingly about “your friend, Herf Applewhite”.
I went to Jr. High and Highschool with a guy that went on to kill his wife. Just last week, a friend of mine was arrested for soliciting a minor over the internet.
Back in my high school days, there was a rather unstable gentleman that was my age, but not exactly “educationally inclined.” So while the rest of us slept through history lectures, he roamed the town and committed acts of petty larceny and general naughtiness.
One day, while rummaging through an elderly gentleman’s apartment, this guy was shocked to find the elderly gentleman returned from the store and standing in the doorway. So he grabbed the old man, tied him to a chair, and proceeded to push the chair down the back stairway. The old man broke just about every bone in his body, and died soon after.
Normally, things like that don’t happen in small New England towns. I’m pretty sure they’re still talking about it.
My brothers went to high school with Mark David Chapman. Weren’t close friends (he was one of those quintessential loner types, as in “he was a quiet man who kept to himself,”) but they knew him.
And I was a juror in a capital case . . . involving a convenience story robbery/murder. A man was killed in a very nasty way and all for what was pocket change. That was a long time ago and I’m still upset over it.
your humble TubaDiva
Yeah, I knew one casually, too. Went to high school with him, he was part of the crowd I’d go out drinking with occasionally. Always thought the guy was a bit of a flake, the kind that always has these really great ideas are actually really stupid, and he’s never going to follow through on them anyway. But I never figured him for being dangerous in any way. He got arrested for raping a three year old girl.
The last I heard of him, he repented from his cell after “finding Christ”. Somehow, that makes me think of the bit one standup comic did about how people only give their lives to Christ after irretrievably screwing them up themselves. What makes them think Christ wants it? (BTW, who’s routine is that? It’s a fairly big name. Denis Leary?)
A high school math teacher at my Texas high school (I went there in the early 70’s; I never had a class with him, but my older brother knew him well and I had talked to him on a few occasions) went nuts some years later and did the combat gear and automatic rifle deal in his church. At the time it was one of the worst mass murders in U.S. history. When I knew him he was fine, if too macho, so I suspect that he had some kind of brain damage due to cancer or something like that.