The other side of this thread.
The more closely involved with the murderer the more interesting. It is only mildly interesting to hear about someone you haven’t even talked to in a decade. It’s far more interesting if you enjoyed lunch with someone less than a week before they took someone else’s life. Whether it was accidental, premeditated or spur of the moment.
I have not been in any kind of contact that I know of with a murderer. I’m still young though, give a few years. 
Go!
A friend of mine who worked at the NC State student radio station got letters with song requests from a guy on death row - he played the songs. Seemed like a normal guy, he later got changed to a life sentence. My friend thought about visiting him but never did, I was going to go along for the visit.
A close friend of mine shot and killed a man in the parking lot of a bar.He was part of the local motorcycle “club”.He and five other members hid the body.
My uncle. Not blood related – he was married to my aunt (my mom’s sister), but he was embezzling money from his company with the help of his coworker. I can’t remember all the details (as this was close to 20 years ago now), but I believe they also took a life insurance policy out on their boss (through my grandfather, who sold life insurance at the time), took him out behind the company building one night, and popped a couple bullets into his chest.
They put his body in the trunk of a car, and parked it in the lot at the Oakland Mall in Madison Heights, MI. Police found it a week or two later, and after some detective work, busted him.
Funnily enough, he was my favorite uncle. Very interesting and funny guy, and treated me and my sisters with good humor and compassion. He always reminded me of Quint… not this one, but this one. He even took me upnorth to his cottage to go snowmobiling, and fire off some rounds from a .22. I was about 14 at the time.
I Still can’t believe he was capable of such atrocities.
I knew a guy in high-school who later slit a bartender’s throat because the bartender wouldn’t cash his check. He was a mean abusive bully in high school, so it really came as no surprise when I found out that he ended up as he did.
When I was 16 my grandfather thought he’d beaten my grandmother to death then went and got one of his swords from his collection and stuck himself right through to the other side.
They both survived so I don’t know a murderer but we almost had a murder-suicide.
Maybe. I don’t…really know exactly how this went down, so it might count as suicide.
Our next door neighbors when I was a kid were junkies. (Well, at the time I didn’t know that, but even when I was nine I could tell that they were weird. In retrospect, it was clear. My parents must have realized, even though they never said anything to me.) When I was about twelve or thirteen, they rented a room in a nice hotel in San Francisco and the man in the couple shot his girlfriend and then himself.
I don’t know if she was in on it, so it might have been murder-suicide, or it might have been a double-suicide. It was certainly shocking, either way.
Yes, a kid my age that lived right next door to me grew up to be a murderer. He had several earmarks to a disturbed human being. He was an animal torturer and his father was in jail for several offenses.
And I also been brutally close to an unsolved murder. One year I was involved in a Member-Guest golf tournament at a pretty ritzy golf tournament. We were partying pretty hard at the dance (at a hotel ballroom), when one of the ladies at our table started to get sick. Her date took her back to their hotel room, and then returned to the party. Several hours later, when he returned to his room, he found his date raped and murdered. I was one of his many alibi witnesses, and was awakened at 4 am for questioning as my date and me also had a room in the hotel.
It was not a pleasant interview with the police. Half-drunk, drowsy and not very coherant. Fortunately, I was not a suspect, but it was a nervous couple of days. Naturally the date was initially the prime suspect, but he was never arrested because the evidence didn’t add up.
It is weird to think that I had cocktails and ate dinner with this woman. And she was a victim of a horrific rape/murder just a few hours later.
Former friend and roommate tried to kill his entire family, but since he didn’t quite succeed I guess it doesn’t qualify.
My first husband and I were friends with another couple who had 3 kids. The man was a philanderer and the couple eventually split up.
I remember that the oldest kid was disturbed, and did little mean things like pull the legs off of live frogs.
When the kid was a young adult, he went to county jail for some minor offence. While he was in there, the kid’s daddy took up with the kid’s girlfriend. When the kid got out he was angry with the dad and went looking for him. He went to a spot by the river where the dad was supposed to be fishing with friends. The dad wasn’t there but my ex-husband’s cousin Kenneth was there alone. The kid was hopped up on drugs and, for some reason, shot & killed Kenneth.
After he murdered Kenneth, he put the body in Kenneth’s truck and drove to another guy’s house. This is weird because the guy was a nephew of Kenneth’s. The kid wanted this guy to help him get rid of the body. If you killed a man, why take the body to a relative’s house for help disposing of evidence ? I never understood that.
Anyway, the boy is in prison now.
My ex-hubby was supposed to go fishing that night as well. Good thing he didn’t.
Dozens of 'em, probably over a hundred. That’s what happens when one works in a prison.
They’re just these guys…
I have known three murderers.
One guy was a dude I used to hang out with, he was a Blood. He told me about being in a drive-by and how he shot the dude and didn’t know if he was alive or dead. He didn’t seem terribly thrilled about it.
Then there was another guy that I met when I was arrested overnight, he was in for double-homicide and from the way he said it I believed he did it, and that he didn’t think he was getting away with it.
Then there was another guy who I had dinner with then like a month later he did this: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/03/16/2007-03-16_horrifying_video_of_maniacs_chase-1.html he was good friends with a friend of mine at the time. He had no idea that his friend would pull something like this.
When I was a kid, my next door neighbor was a regular dad with two kids my age. But it was widely known in the neighborhood that when he was a teen, he had murdered his abusive father with a shotgun. Apparently he had been incarcerated as a juvenile, but received a light sentence because of the abuse. He was a nice enough neighbor, but we were always a little scared of him.
Then, about 2 years after I graduated from high school, a guy I had gone to high school with murdered a young woman with a knife. The murderer was caught right away. He committed the murder in his parents’ home, he didn’t hide the body and he didn’t try to run away or anything.
I had known the murderer’s brother in high school, but only knew the murderer as his weird brother who always wore dark glasses. I lived in a small town, so the crime was really shocking, but on the other hand people did say things like, “I always knew there was something wrong with that guy.”
I was in a mentoring program and they had two kids there, they were really sweet kids, they were 10 and 11. Now they are 15 and are both in prison for “attempted murder.”
So much for that program, but that is as close as I’ve come to personally knowing a murderer.
Oh yeah, a couple kids from my HS, one that I knew and another that I didn’t accidentally shot another kid who was in my typing class. They drove around in a panic while the kid bled out and died. They probably could have saved him if they went straight to the hospital.
My dad’s cousin, sort of thought of him as an uncle and he may have been, we weren’t close to that part of the family, was married to an odd woman from Taiwan. They were both odd, in fact. Anyway, somehow they were hurting for money so she took a job in a bar and then started screwing some guy. He found out, then waited outside the bar for the guy to come out and ran him down. He went to prison for murder but then got back together with his wife. Later he dies in prison of AIDS.
I also had a great grandfather who was convicted of murder of the scion of a wealthy Mexican family in Tuscon before Arizona was a state. They both had been drinking and then fighting and then drinking together. Eventually another fight broke out and my antecedent stabbed the guy. He died. Supposedly the other guy also had a weapon and it was self defense, but he was convicted of 2nd or 3rd degree murder (or similar). It was a very tabloid thing back in the day, and we only found out because some of my relatives are into genealogy and found out about it in the newspaper clippings. My dad’s grandmother had told everyone that he had died when he was really in prison. He was released after only about seven years but she never spoke to him again. She just would say, in Spanish, that he was a bad, bad man. The newspaper stories indicated that maybe the guy he killed was a bit of a bad seed as well, which explains the relatively light sentence.
I know at least five on a first name basis and probably a few more if I dug a little deeper. I grew up in a very poor and rural area of Louisiana that turned out more than its fair share of murderers. The supermarket that I worked in during high school seemed like a training ground for them.
The most notable though was one of my closest childhood friends. We had sleepovers every few weeks and watched the Dukes of Hazard together. He moved away much later in elementary school but I saw him a few times and my mother was still friends with his parents. He got heavily involved in gambling and built up so much debt that he got desperate. He found someone dumb enough to take a large casino jackpot home in cash and followed the man. When he confronted the man in his driveway, the man handed over the money but that wasn’t good enough. He made him get down on his hands and knees and beg for his life and then just blew his head off.
That was the only case he was convicted for but lots of people think he was a serial killer by that point and is linked to several other cases but never proven. He was up for the death penalty and I really wish that he had gotten it but his father got people to lie through their teeth to give him false alibis and that was good enough to shift the penalty to life in Angola without the possibility of parole. I am almost tempted to write him just to gain some perspective on these things. What a waste.
Life in Angola? I bet he wishes he got the death penalty too.
There was a rumor…
There was this guy I met who was dating my classmate. He lived in the housing projects, and I felt his heart was in the right place, even though his environment was working against him. I tried to hang out with him, get him to go back to school, and in general, live a good life. I thought he turned the corner, but one day he disappeared. Later, I met him, and he made a somewhat offhand comment I didn’t know how to interpret:
“In the place I live, there’s only one way in and one way out. When there’s a fight, everybody knows where to go: we block off both sides, and catch them in the middle…There’s a bridge, and if you fall off it, your head just explodes…you ever seen that? It’s nuts man.”
The ex boyfriend of my little sis (the same sis whose friend was murdered recently in the other thread) is doing two life sentences for double murder. He borrowed her car and went to a nightclub with two friends, and was found the next day out in the countryside, comatose, near two bodies, with his fingerprints all over the gun that was used to kill them.
He claimed amnesia due to drink and drugs - and his presence at the scene indicates that this may have been at least in part the truth. He was a bad person, and involved with some seriously nasty gangsta shit, but still I think it was something of an unsafe conviction, as the two other guys - one of whom was the owner of the gun - weren’t even called as witnesses, yet all three guys’ prints were on the weapon.
In the end he did a plea bargain to escape the possibility of the chair. Horrible business, and I feel terrible for the victims and their families.
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