This was in, I think, the early 80’s or maybe very late 70’s. I’d been out of high school a few years and was sharing a place with my best friend from high school. We’d met up with another friend from school a few months before. Suzie was one of those people you couldn’t help liking but, on the other hand, couldn’t really trust much so our friendship with her was pretty sporadic.
We were over at Suzie’s house and had been about to leave when she got a phone call from a guy (I think she called him Billy) who she said was her boyfriend but she was wanting to break it off with him. He was coming over and she didn’t want to be alone with him so she asked us to stay a while longer.
He came over and something just seemed…off about him. Nothing you could put your finger on but he made us both feel hinky. Still, we’d promised to stay so we did. Pretty soon, however, a whole bunch of people, most of them giving off that low-life vibe, were there and we decided we’d had enough. We went looking for Suzie to tell her we were going and found several people gathered around the kitchen table shooting up.
Well, that did it and we were out of there in a heartbeat. Suzie was apparently in another downward spiral and we dropped contact with her. We heard through the grapevine at some point that she was living with Billy in Oklahoma.
I’m not sure how much later this was, probably two or three years, but I was watching the local news. There had been several people (I want to say five) murdered in a small town in Oklahoma several months to a year back, an event that was believed to be drug-related. One of the killers had been caught and was being held in our jail while awaiting extradiction.
I hadn’t been paying close attention but looked up just as they showed the guy being led in to jail. My jaw dropped. It was Billy. I’d only met him that one time but he’d given me such a creepy vibe that I recognized him. Suzie’s name came up in the local paper under police reports when she got arrested for trying to smuggle drugs into jail for him.
I met up with Suzie several years after that and had occasional contact with her through mutual friends until she died in the mid-90’s. She always insisted that she and Billy had broken up by the time the murders occurred. I hope that’s true but she was a legendarily good liar so I’ve never been entirely sure.
For about two months I shared a bedroom with a guy who was about 61 years old. He spent only half of those years not incarcerated.
He started young living a life of running pills from Tijuana to San Diego, when the border wasn’t as strict as it is now. Somehow he got betrayed by a woman and another guy, so he (admittedly) committed first degree murder at 19 in Pomona, many years ago.
In the end, he ended up by robbing nine banks in the south L.A. area, and the last time he got into a shootout with some FBI agents, who finally brought him down.
He was generally kind and easy to get along with, but having lived locked up for so long left him an extremely distrustful person.
When I was in grade 10, my biology class teacher assigned us the project of interviewing a real-life scientist. This was easy for me, because my dad was a scientist. Of course I thought it would be lame beyond words to interview my own dad, so I asked him to recommend someone he knew to interview. He recommended a fellow who was a teacher of his many years ago - a guy on the verge of retirement, who he said was “quite a character”.
I went to interview this guy, and he was, indeed, quite a character. We hit it off very well (of course he knew my dad well), and we ended up talking for hours.
Somehow, the topic of his WW2 service came up - he had been a volunteer in the Canadian navy, serving on the ships escorting convoys across the Atlantic. He talked about this for a while, then for some reason I do not understand he told me that, while serving on the ships, he’d killed a man. Allegedly he thought the other fellow was making a sexual advance to him, so he’d hit him - knocking his head against the steel bulkhead. In a panic, he’d pushed the unconcious guy overboard. It was at night in the middle of winter in the North Atlantic, and he wasn’t spotted. The guy was reported missing and that was that.
Well, this was more than a bit freaky, and certainly not what one could report for a grade 10 biology project. I asked my dad about it and he said that yes, he’d heard that story before. Apparently, sort of like the ancient mariner, he had this urge to confess his crime over and over again. His guilt must have been consuming him all those years.
In grad school one of my fellow grad students (also a friend of mine) was convicted for double homicide after he killed a man and his wife (apparently over an argument about my friend’s girlfriend). He then stole the couple’s car and took the bodies to Wyoming where they were found and fairly quickly traced back to him.
I have a sneaking suspicion that I am the reason that Wyoming entered into it. Well before the incident a few of us were traveling through eastern Washington to visit a school topic related industry when someone commented about how desolate the area was (I was the only one in the car from the western hemisphere) and I reply that this was nothing–you should see central Wyoming…In the several times I visited him in prison I never asked him about that.
To speak to a few points, he was one of the nicest people I had ever known and the whole thing caught me completely by surprise. He confessed during the trial and got 65 years.
I worked for the accused* in a domestic capacity for a few years from late 1991, the year the crime took place. It sort of shocked and creeped me out for a while that he’d already remarried and had a new ‘built in’ family within so few months of his wife’s murder. But hey…he was a very nice bloke, and eventually I came to understand that not all people follow regular grieving patterns.
He’d already retired when I started working for them, he was the ‘house-husband’ whilst his new wife went out to work and the child (not his) was studying at university. He was always at home when I was there, we got on famously and he was a brilliant cook!
I must say I’m shocked by today’s revelations. But it’s always the ones you least suspect yada yada.
Due to his age and supposed ill-health, he’s been released on bail. One can only hope that the families of the deceased can finally reach some closure after so many years…and may the accused* be run over by a car with spiky wheels for such a heinous act of callous violence.
*Just don’t want anyone identifying me so have not used the name of the murderer in the post!
Wow, Kam. That was always one of those cases that stays with you. When I heard the news today, I couldn’t believe it (in a good way). I hope there’s closure for their families.
I had a fairly close friend who killed his girlfriend and then killed himself because she had broken up with him. It was a long time ago, but still gives me the shivers just thinking about it.
I knew one murderer-for hire who sucked so badly at it that he left a credit card receipt at the murder scene. We worked together at the local community college and had lunch together pretty often. This guy killed at least 2 people and the cops are pretty sure he killed a 3rd, but they couldn’t find a body. He was a gun dealer and he was always trying to sell me a gun.
I also knew a “terrorist” who I worked with at the Smithsonian. He wasn’t really, he was just a fucked up idiot, but he got labeled as one when he created a fake bomb vest and went out on one of the DC bridges and threatened to blow it up. His demand was to talk to his wife – they were going through an ugly dovorce at the time.
I was in a local park with my dog and people were there searching for a missing woman. She disappeared the day before. Went home and the story was on the news. They found her body a few days later about a mile away.
Her husband was convicted of murder but then he got a new trial. He ended up pleading guilty to 2nd degree murder to avoid the 2nd trial.
When I was about 12yo the father of a family from my church killed his wife, two kids, and himself in a murder-suicide. I knew “of” the family at the time it happened. A few weeks ago someone from my hometown who I had met once about 5 years ago was convicted of drunk driving and leaving the scene of an accident as a result of a hit and run that killed a pedestrian. However he was not actually convicted of murder.
I took a quick read through to see if I posted this when it was started and didn’t see it so sorry if I’m repeating myself.
An ex boyfriend is currently in jail for the 3 counts of murder and 1 or 2 counts of attempted murder. He used to operate an ice cream truck and one day he got shot during a robbery. I got it really at away at him mentally because he retaliated by showing up at their house wearing a police shirt and ordered them to lie on the ground where he then shot them all. It turned out they weren’t the people responsible for the crime:smack: One of the survivors was able to identify him and he’s been incarcerated ever since. This would have been about three years ago on Thanksgiving. Strangely enough I can’t find any current info on him. I would assume I would have heard if there was a trial; it was kind of a big deal around here.
I worked with a woman for about 11 years and we were very close friends. She and her husband both were close to retirement after 29 years with the same company. Then she was accidentaly killed by a gunshot at their rural home, just the two of them there. Her husband called me and asked that I be a pallbearer at her funeral. He and I sat and talked about her, I told him stories about her from the office. She was a bright, caring, loving woman and there were lots to tell. He asked me how he could go on after having lost his best friend. This was all a year and a half ago. A couple of months ago a grand jury charged him with first degree murder in her death. So maybe.
My brother’s friend killed his wife, dismembered her body, burnt her body, buried the remains in his backyard and built a shed over them. I didn’t know this when I sat in his kitchen chatting with him; my brother didn’t know it when he was making home brew in that shed. It was years later that he was caught. However, he wasn’t convicted of murder. He pleaded self defense and was convicted of manslaughter. He served about four years.
Lifelong friend (well, actually my lifelong best friend’s brother, who was my big brother’s lifelong friend-we all hung out together) was cuckolded by a friend of his. LLF was getting high all weekend, went over to talk/whine/beg his ex to get back with him. LLF killed her new boyfriend.
That being said, he always a dumbass. 10 years before he was lookout for a burglary and got arrested then.
I also worked with a college TV interactive system, and I went out to various prisons and met the students/prisoners. I became friends with one who was particularly laid back, smart and likable; he had had some creep viciously murder his wife for insurance money, in a staged burglary scheme.
Well, I’ll take back the ‘smart’ part of my description of him; the policy was taken out about a week before.
A girl in my high school killed her father when she was 15 or 16. She was a little older than me but I knew her from school theatre activities. She actually had a crush on me about a year before this happened. Her story was featured on a couple news magazine shows over the next several years. I have not seen her since, although I heard she was recently released from prison.