I went to school with a very sweet girl. Somehow, she got mixed up with an older guy who was into some heavy drugs and a rough lifestyle. Anyhoo, they got married and had some kids. He was always an asshole and she finally had had enough. She had a boyfriend. The husband found out that she was going to leave him for the boyfriend, and confronted him. He said he just wanted to get to know him and talk to him, blah-blah-blah.
So he killed him and drove around town with his body in the passenger seat, talking to him and just behaving like he was a bleeding, brainless passenger. He went to jail, but I don’t think he even did 20 years.
Another friend of mine was at a huge party. Everyone was drunk and a fight broke out. A younger guy got scared and got in his car to leave and accidentally ran my friend’s best friend over and killed him. My friend went nuts and pulled the guy out of the car and stabbed him to death. And the dead guy turned out to be my Jr. high math teacher’s adopted son. Weird, huh? My friend did around 5 years or so, on account of it was a crime of passion, I guess. He’s a changed man. Flying the straight and narrow ever since, so I hear. We weren’t very chummy.
My sister had a really good friend that she looked up to alot. This woman really became my sister’s mentor and helped her develop her ideas of what it meant to really be a strong woman in the modern world. I was really happy about this, as Angie (my sister) really seemed to shine at that time in her life.
Latter, after my sister had moved to Arkansas, the woman killer her own husband (who was a police officer) by shooting him 15 times. She then forced one of her daughters at gunpoint to help her dispose of the evidence by driving about 50 miles away and dumping it in a lake. She then returnde home and tried to clean the mess and paint over it. She attempted to plead inoccent, but when both of her daughters testified against her, she did change her story and plead guilty.
I knew a former mayor of a small city who was having trouble with a councilmember – they were disagreeing on various political measures, nothing personal that I know of. He and the police chief knew the councilmember was having trysts with a woman “not his wife” as they say, so they secretly videotaped a couple of these trysts and attempted to blackmail the councilmember. But it backfired. The councilmember went to the state police, they did some investigating, and the mayor and the police chief went to jail.
I also had three acquaintances in high school – the kind who sit in the bakc of the class, flunk tests, make rude comments and sleep during class. They could be OK at times, or real assholes at times. The summer after we graduated, they went out drinking and driving and whooping it up, until they ran into the tree that killed them all. Fortunately, no one ELSE got killed. It was Darwin in action, alrighty.
When I was a sophmore in high school I dated this guy.
A week or so after the murder/suicide I was reading the local paper while I was visiting my mom. I started freaking out when I read the article. I asked her why she didn’t call me to let me know it had happened. She said she thought the name sounded familiar but couldn’t remember if she knew him. Then I told her that he had been to our house several time and the reason she knew him was because we had dated.
I had a friend in Jr. High and early HS who burned her three kids up. Evidently she couldn’t handle the pressures of parenting. She had kind of a weird childhood, raised by her grandfather and such. I don’t know what kind of shit has to happen for a person to do something like that.
Then there was this guy I knew in college. He was a big dude and used to bounce for bars and stuff. When I was a stripper doing private parties, he came with me several times. One night he kidnapped a liquor store clerk and beat him to death in a park and then sodomized him. He ended up getting some kind of cancer and he died in prison.
My brother’s FIL is on death row. We had always found him obnoxious, but never got any kind of a creepy vibe from him, so it was a total shock when Bro called one Sunday morning to warn us about the arrest that was going to be all over the news.
Mr. Kat’s brother worked with the - oh, heck, I’m spacing it off - the Seattle-area, Green River? guy - back in the 70’s and/or early 80’s. Worked as in day job, not helped with crimes.
My mother’s first cousin (my first cousin once removed?) shot his girlfriend and then turned the gun on himself. She survived, he didn’t. This was about thirty years ago.
I was perusing the front page of the local newspaper about ten years ago, and saw a headline that a local man was arrested for felony possession of child pornography. He had downloaded a LOT of kiddie porn onto his work computer, and the IT staff of his company cooperated with the FBI in a sting operation. If memory serves, he was going up for ten years. It was someone I’d worked with just a year or two previously – he was actually my manager’s manager. I was shocked because I knew him as a devout Mormon with nine children of his own. I was more shocked that I’d never gotten the slightest creep vibe off him whatsoever.
A former coworker of mine was the only survivor of a horrific workplace shooting about ten years ago. She had left the job where I knew her to work for state government. She was sharing an office with two others in a state building. The estranged husband of one of her officemates busted up into the building, shot his ex-wife and the other man in the office, then raped my friend and shot himself. She was very messed up for years. That crime is the reason why state buildings in Louisiana had extensive security even before 9/11.
One of the sweetest guys I ever knew in when I was going to AA regularly had murdered his best friend while in an alcoholic blackout.
Many many years ago when I was living in Scotland [and a practicing Catholic] I used to attend a church where a new priest arrived called Fr L****, no one seemed to like him much, I had a conversation with him one day about my Dad being in hospital, and he seemed OK, just the sort of person who never starts a conversation but will join in one.
Years later, [now living in Ireland] I went over to Scotland on holiday and there was a documentary on TV about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, I wasn’t paying much attention but heard the name L****, looked at the TV and saw my former priest - he’d admitted to molesting boys at the seminary. What stuck in my craw about it was he wasn’t de-frocked, he’d (as in the OP) been moved from Parish to Parish. He eventually left the Priesthood and married …
I forgot to explain that part of it. She was 19–past the age of being under protection of CPS, and old enough that when WE called the State Police, we were told that she would have to be the one to file a complaint.
I finally kicked up enough fuss that the State Police used domestic violence guidelines and filed charges of intimidation and harassment against him. No rape charges, though. I don’t know what ever happened with those charges, though–as far as I know, nothing.
Trust me, we called everydamnbody. It was incredibly frustrating.
I was reading this thread thinking, “Wow, I don’t know anyone like that.” But the more I thought about it, I realized that yes, I have known several people who committed serious crimes. I have known several big-time drug offenders, with the usual attendant acts of violence one would associate with professional hard drug dealing. Frankly, I don’t know how many (if any) of them ever got caught, but I know that a couple of them would have done serious, serious time if they were. And I don’t really think they were smart enough to not get caught.
The one that really stands out in my mind, though, was a guy who cooked at a restaurant I worked at. He was an Italian guy from New York City, kinda short, but obviously very tough. He was never anything but nice to me. Once, over after work beers, it came out that he had done several years in prison for manslaughter. He and another man had administered a Mob-ordered beatdown to a guy who owed money, but they went too far and the guy died. When my friend told the story, he became very emotional. He really regretted what had happened and was making a concerted and successful effort to turn his life around. He had a new wife (who was black–the only time I ever saw him lose his temper was when someone in the bar said “nigger”) and kid and a straight job far from NYC. I don’t know what happened to him, but I like to think he made it.
Years ago I threw a surprise birthday for one my roomies that lasted for three days.
On the second day, a couple of bikers showed up looking for one of the participants and I invited them to hang around and have a few.
Seemed like nice enough guys at the time. :rolleyes:
Of course, I was too stupid to notice that they were carrying guns but one of my friends did, and, and luckLy for me, he insisted that the weapons be left in their truck.
As the day progressed, I got into a verbal fracas with the one we’d all dubbed ‘Surly’.
Surly and I were alone on the porch and he started to make suggestive sexual remarks to me.
Being the smartass that I am, I countered by offering to get two of my girlfriends so that the three of us could decide whether or not his penis was as stupendous as he was making it out to be.
After all, I reasoned, we girls had had enough experience with various “whoppers” to get him an educated and informed opinon.
He got all huffy and left.
The very next morning, he shot a co-worker over a $5.00 bet.
A relative by marriage got pissed off when his wife left him and ran off with the Fuller Brush man. So he followed them to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and killed them both. I only met him a couple of times.
I trained in judo with a guy who was shot to death by his girlfriend (she walked - it was domestic abuse). And several former co-workers spent time at Club Fed as a consequence of the savings and loans scandals of the 80s.
And a childhood friend has spent most of his life in prison. Nothing too terribly nasty, he just steals everything that isn’t nailed down or red hot. And lies just to keep in practice. Once in a while I get letters from him asking me to testify as to his character for parole hearings.
Actually, that is the thread! But when I went to write the OP, I couldn’t find the link for it.
Another story of mine… My first gynecologist, Dr, Hamilton, is currently doing time for murder. He did my mom’s hysterectomy, and I saw him just two weeks before Valentine’s Day 2001. On Valentine’s Day, he murdered his wife. He really botched it, too. He was late for surgery, strangled her with the same necktie he was seen wearing earlier that day, sounded totally unbelievable on the phone, etc. The link goes to a local newstation’s archive of the coverage, and may require free registration.
The strange thing is, he seemed fairly normal. His eyes always struck me as weird though. I just chalked that up to him being a male gyno
I have to confess that I know 4 people. All currently on trail, or awaiting trial, for 1st degree murder.
I grew up across the street from one of the kids who would later be one of the infamous ‘Brown’s Chicken’ muderers in Palatine, IL. I hung out in their house as a kid, even stayed there for an hour after school each day one year before my parents came home. They were the kinda kids that killed or ate bugs, I could’ve guessed something was gonna happen with one of those kids.
I went to High School with two kids that would later marry, have two children, and starve the second one to death. When their 2nd baby died at around 1yr old, it was only a pound or so more than birth. They 4 or 5yr old was fine. I knew the wife more than the husband, she was the awkward girl on my bus that got picked on.
My girlfriend grew up with a recent murderer from North Carolina who cut up his 9mo pregnant wife into little pieces, stuffed them into a barrel (with some of his own mail :smack: ) and threw it into the river. Ex-junkie and a very disturbed individual.
One of my childhood friends, Jim’s brother date raped a girl. I grew up with this kid along with his brother. Apparently his brother and this girl got really drunk at a party and ended up having sex. She claimed it was rape and he ended up going to jail. Never found out if he got charged or not. I lost contact with the entire family.
Forgot another one. I went to college and rode the bus with a guy whose girlfriend helped robbed a guy. They ended up killing him because he tried to grab the gun they were using. The girlfriend didn’t actively participate in the murder, but she drove the car so they charged her as well. I met her the year before this happened. Obviously like others have said here, she didn’t seem like the type to do this. They had a daughther together and she seemed like such a great mom. He got custody and she got 5 years, out after 3 I believe.
In discussion with my sister, I remember that we went to school with Darcy Watmough. He later was jailed for a drug-related murder.
He was good-looking, a great athlete, nice guy. He fucked himself up on drugs and it ultimately ruined his life.
I also remembered after my last post that I went to school with another later child-molester. Hated the fucker. I had enough of his teasing one day and went off on him during English class. The teacher told me later that I was completely justified and she was glad I stood up to him.
My 5th grade teacher murdered his wife. It happened a year or two after I was in his class (I think I was the summer between 6th and 7th grade). It was a small town and a private christian school, and his wife and been to class many times for various reasons.
