Not serial killers per se but, when I was a kid, Mizmoon Soltysik moved in next door. She let me color in a Blue Meanie coloring book one time.
When he broke out of Soledad, Cinque came to live with her. Camilla Hall was around regularly, too. They all disappeared when they kidnapped Patty Hearst.
I read this and busted out laughing. I can’t shake the Norm McDonald take on the Unabomber sketch. No, I’m not gonna link to it.
Because I refuse to get an iphone, that’s my nickname at work.
Since spree killings are allowed, I can add my brush with a murderer. I used to work with a local murderer who killed three people while high on bath salts (fake cocaine kind, not the make your tub water smell good kind). We were in different departments so we didn’t work that closely together but we did encounter each other pretty much every workday. He was always nice to me, but that might have been because I controlled the snack supply.
I feel weird bringing this up to people in my town because it seems like everyone I talked about it to knew one of his victims. I didn’t know any of them, but I didn’t live on that side of town. Local opinion is pretty unanimous that the killer got what was coming to him.
You don’t have a large brown patch on your cheek above your beard line. If you were to look at pictures, you would see that there is a large brown patch on his cheek above his beard line with some stray hairs growing out of it. I noticed this when I saw pictures of him in the news and thought "Hey, he looks like that Really Creepy guy I saw " one day while I was driving along a street.
I only remembered that little blip because something about him, that guy with the big brown patch on his cheek ( …who was just standing by the curb waiting for a bus?) just radiated Pure. Fucking. Evil. And I wanted to drive past that asshole just as fast as I possibly could.
.
The only other… well it was a couple we used to know. She ran a dance studio, he a construction related company. She discovered her sex addiction (“went sex crazy”) and not only did her students, but some of their neighbors, and some of his employees too.
He found out.
The police called it “murder-suicide”.
Was this a woman named Crystal in either Alabama or Mississippi? That story sounds awfully familiar, and has been covered in true-crime blogs and shows like “Forensic Files.” What made that story all the more tragic was that she thought the man who killed her was a friend.
About a year before he was arrested, I visited at a friend’s farm less than a mile from where Ed Gein was living. Gein then moved, to the state prison, which was only a block from my parents’ house where I grew up.
Two surgeons at my hospital were in Michael Swango’s residency program. One of them who I often worked with tells a story in “Blind Eye” about he and other surgical residents getting deathly ill after eating “extra spicy” pizza that Swango brought to work.* They were throwing up during an operation (one assumes, not into the patient).
My other intersection with the Swango affair was years earlier during med school. I was recruited to the school’s internal medicine residency program by the director, who effusively praised a presentation I gave at a department conference. I felt really good about that, but my interests lay elsewhere.
Later, the same guy was instrumental in getting Swango admitted to the internal medicine residency program. 
*In addition to murdering his patients, Swango got into trouble for poisoning co-workers’ food while working as a paramedic in Illinois. We’ll never know what was in the “extra spicy” pizza.
A pharmacist I worked with at that same hospital had a brother who was a physician, and Swango graduated a year late because this brother/physician flunked him in his rotation.
So many chances to have stopped that train. And yet. C’est la guerre
Makes me wonder a) how many Swango-equivalents are out there today and b) how many Swango-equivalents are stopped during their efforts to get that license to kill.