His adoptive brother was later convicted of murdering a man over a jug of quarters. The brother was the initial suspect in the murder of their adoptive parents but was in a psychiatric hospital miles away at the time.
My home state of Indiana brings us one of the original torture-murders, that of Sylvia Likens in 1965.
In 1992, Indiana became infamous again with the torture-murder of Shanda Sharer, a 12 year old girl who lived about 15 minutes from me. We went to the same junior high school, though different years, and I knew a few of the girls on the periphery of the murder, and had met the mastermind, Melinda Loveless, once, as we had a mutual friend or two.
My current state, Kentucky, gives us Mel Ignatow, who brutally murdered his ex-girlfriend, Brenda Sue Schaefer, after sexually torturing her. He was acquitted of the crime, and was a free man until the missing evidence turned up that proved him guilty. He was brought before a grand jury and, knowing he couldn’t be tried or punished due to “double jeopardy” laws, confessed to torturing her, raping her, and killing her while a female friend took pictures. He was subsequently convicted of perjury. From his wiki:
This one doesn’t qualify in terms of what the OP is looking for, but we have a friend of the family currently on Death Row for murdering a police officer in 1997. The officer arrived at the scene of a domestic dispute, and Vince Stopher rushed the officer, wrestled the cop’s gun away from him, and shot the officer in the face. When Vince was arrested, he allegedly said to the other cops (something along the lines of) “I hope that cop fucking dies.”
Vince was 24 at the time of the incident. Same age as me at the time. He’s been on Death Row ever since. 20+ years.
Around here the Big Easy has a rich history of infamous crimes. My personal favorite is the Axe Man murders from 1911-12. Lots of evidence, lots of bodies, not a lot of closure.
And the ironic thing about that is that he tortured her over a glass-topped coffee table, and died because he tripped and fell into one, and bled to death while trying to crawl to the phone.
In 1880s Austin, the Servant Girl Annihilator brutally murdered seven women and one man over the course of a year, splitting their heads open with an axe. Interestingly, O. Henry was a resident of Austin at the time and coined the term “Servant Girl Annihilator.”
More recently, in 1991 four teenagers were murdered in a yogurt shopin a case that has never been solved. A terrible crime, and the subsequent conviction of two suspects in 1999 was overturned over alleged coerced confessions and the discovery of male DNA at the scene that did not match either suspect.
Since you nabbed that one, which was the first to come to my mind, I’ll go with Judge Crater. Unsolved disappearance, foul play suspected, about 90 years ago.
I read this book a while back, and the author believes that the Villisca axe murderer did that one as well. That he possibly committed a mass murder in GERMANY a decade later was a bit of a stretch (juuuuust a bit…) but he did make some interesting links between that one and many others.
I have not heard this elsewhere, or seen it online (and there may be some very good reasons for this) but I used to work with a woman whose husband was in the Texas National Guard in 2003, and they were the main crew who searched the debris field after the crash of the Columbia. They were looking for 7 bodies, and in fact found 9; IIRC, those two “extra” bodies turned out to be the work of a serial killer in the region, and one of those people had not even been reported missing at the time. :eek:
Her husband found “something”, if you will, but out of respect for the victim, I will not say who or what it was. Everyone who does something like that has to get counseling, but in his case, he continued it after the required sessions were completed.
Not exactly in the spirit of my own thread, since I’m not 100% sure on *where *this happened, but it’s interesting none-the-less, as it technically involves family.
My dad has a cousin who came home to discover his wife cheating on him. He proceeded to then murder both her and the guy she was cheating on him with. Since most of my family is in Wisconsin, I’m guessing that’s where this happened, but can’t say for sure. I do know it was before I was born in '88.
This is horrifying. Like, without the sexual components it’s comparable to A Child Called It. With them…holy shit. That poor, poor girl. I’m horrified.
The linked article is rather sketchy but it is my recollection that he was suspected of a number of murders for which he was never charged.
He was suspected of killing my math teacher’s girlfriend, whose murder was unsolved when I was in high school (I don’t know if they ever positively identified the killer) and my mother was fascinated by Breest. She even took me to court to watch his trial one day!
My mother had a theory that my math teacher was a closeted gay and so deliberately sought out self-destructive women to date, so he’d have an excuse to break up with them. Further (according to her theory), this strategy was so effective that he actually managed to date a woman who got herself offed by a serial killer - thus freeing up the teacher to grieve eternally and never have to date a woman again. :rolleyes:
