Someone makes the news for one notorious reason or other and one of us who knows them realizes, “Wow, that’s RandyAndy, a frequent poster!”
Here is an old thread about dopers who knew someone in the news, but those persons were not members of the SDMB,
I remember at least one regular who admitted to serious crimes when he was younger–but don’t remember his SDMB handle.
Anyone?
But few of us know regulars’ real life names.
I don’t want to go into too much detail but I did make national newspapers (twice, one without my name, the next day the same article with my name added) over 20 years ago.
We were caught red-handed, faced a minimum ten year sentence. The trial failed for various reasons, including unnecessary fabrication of evidence. If the police had just done their job I would have been incarcerated.
This did happen in Zimbabwe, so not that newsworthy!
ETA: drug bust, with non-addictive personal consumption chemicals only. I do now know the full name of 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine
Moderator Note
I was just going to close this, since doper’s real names are rarely known and this could easily result in someone being doxxed. I am going to leave it open for now, but be very careful about posting any identifying information.
Here is the official rule:
A lot of us committed serious crimes when we were younger, me included depending on how you define serious. That’s not the question. OP wants to know about Dopers who ended up on the news because of something notorious which doesn’t necessarily even have to involve crime.
I am in a few seconds of this Frontline special about a high profile criminal case. Except, I’m a lawyer who was involved; not the accused.
I was once the subject of an APB for breaking into a government building, which — misses it pretty close, I guess?
It’s statements like this that make me question my life choices. I’ve never committed a serious crime when younger. Or even a non-serious crime. Unless you count speeding, illegal parking, or publishing.
If I were in charge, I’d incarcerate you for that Oxford comma. I was just briefly a drug dealer (MDMA when it was new and LSD). I don’t think it’s a big deal but I would have done time.
I should take my own advice and pay better attention. The OP specifically asked about a newsworthy criminal.
Not a SDMB poster, but I had a co-worker who got busted for raping his adopted daughter. Got life and, it was big news.
Since we have the same name, I like to say it’s me, but my grandfather and one or two of his brothers are mentioned in at least one mafia book that I have. My family, at least the ones I know, were never in the mafia, but we had enough contact with them to be mentioned in the same breath as the actual mafia people. My dad had to appear before a grand jury in a mafia related case back in the 70’s. When they were dating, my mom thought it was ‘cool’ when they had the FBI (or whoever it would have been) following them around all night.
I’ll just say that you never see Cecil and D.B. Cooper in the same pictures.
Not me, or a poster here as far as I know, but at Roku I worked closely with Brandon Marshall, who was killed by police at Roku headquarters in a bizarre incident where he ingested some pills at work, acted erratically, and then attacked police who were called to check on him. I wasn’t at the office at the time of the incident.
There’s at least one troll who trolled here and pretty much every other place on the Net, who trolled so obnoxiously that he actually managed to get criminal charges against him for it.
I guess David (Snopes) Mikkelson falls under this category for some of his later escapades. He did admit to plagiarizing some of the articles he wrote. In the early days of Alt Folklore Urban he also hung out on the Alt Fan Cecil-Adams Usenet group which predates the SDMB.
Idle thoughts about Missing people and I sometimes entertain the idea that one of us could be a serial killer. 
They’ll never find out.
Bwa ha.
Not related to Unca Cecil, but how about a radio show call-in confession? This sorta famous shock jock liked baiting women into getting them to admit they were shallow or golddiggers, in that vein. 1 called up obviously pissed and pissed off @Tom (2 separate things). She was slurring her words, to be clear, but they ask callers if they consent to being put on the air & she agreed. She bragged that among other things women were just smarter than men cause they can manipulate by crying, and no1 will suspect them of violence. Then came the bombshell: she bragged about staging a shooting to make it look like her man had attacked her, then himself & got away with her claim of suicide. Note that the DA didn’t say she didn’t do it; he filed a case against her for filing a false report [that some1 stole her cell phone when she had it], but didn’t say it was for sure suicide. Possibly because of the high bar of proof & the crime happening so long before, she likely got away with it.
Here it is, the infamous case of Ahwatukee Sue:
Facebook
If we’re going to go down that tangent, I remember a thread here where some poster said their coworker was the guy who voluntarily flew to Germany to be eaten by the German cannibal. Can anyone dig up that thread?
Edit: It was @Revtim in 2003: An old colleague of mine was voluntarily cannibalized and killed. TM friggin' I.