Shortly before I began my current job, there was an attempted attack on the company. A delusional employee attempted to hijack a company plane, with the goal of crashing it into the group of buildings where I now work. The hijacking was thwarted by the bravery of the flight crew, all of whom were grievously injured. Had the hijacking succeeded, my life would be drastically different (different job in a different part of the country) and most of the people I currently work with would probably be dead.
I once had a roommate who refused to help “a guy with a cast on his arm” put his canoe on his car at a local lake the day Ted Bundy used the cast ploy to kidnap and kill two women from that very park.
She said he just gave her the creeps.
For me, one degree of separation from a couple of serial killers.
That’s what happens when you have a delightful patient population like mine! 
I’m not sure about actual serial killers, but my high-school friend’s younger brother helped to kill a girl in a rather horrific way, apparently in order to “please Satan.” He was 15, I was about 19 at the time.
A former co-worker’s aunt briefly dated the Green River Killer. He was at their Thanksgiving dinner that year.
That’s all I got.
MY best friend from the age of 4 - 7 is on death row in the infamous Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana. He followed a jackpot winner home from a casino and executed him. He is also believed to be involved in one or more additional murders. I don’t know if he qualifies as a serial killer but it is a little spooky knowing the person you fell asleep with watching the Dukes of Hazzard would be capable of such things.
If you check out some of the short chapters in the following link http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/ng/call_1.html, you might remember something about the “bags of bones” case around San Francisco in the 90’s. Anyway, an old neighbor of mine from Brookfield (WI) who was also a friend in Madison, moved out to SF & formed a band. I think it was her drummer (now I’m forgetting…coulda been the guitarist now that I’m thinking about it) went to help a guy move one day & never showed up again. Turns out the guy he went to help was this Charlie Ng character (well, he or his buddy Lake). My friend had this horrid dream about her band member getting tortured which was probably closer to reality than anything. Pretty creepy.
Also, when I worked for the DNR years ago, I always heard the story about how years & years ago, they almost hired Ed Gein to do some side work for them. I guess everyone said Ed was a real good worker & all. :eek:
One of my best friends is an ex-NY Jet football player who knows OJ.
i have a friend, and played softball with a guy who worked at the mental institution where Ed Gein spent the last 20 years or so of his life. ‘Psycho’ and other movies loosely based on his life. Lampshades out of skin, etc…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Gein
Eeew…from that site: “Gidget Gein” was the stage name of a bassist in the band Marilyn Manson (real name Brad Stewart).
Apparently a friend of mine in high school took to prom the daughter of Robert Lee Yates, the Spokane Serial Killer. One of his drops was about a block and a half from another friend’s house.
http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial_killers/predators/yates/guy_8.html
Well, if having dinner with someone is good enough to establish a degree-of-separation link, I am 5 degrees away from Adolf Hitler.
I have of course had dinner with my wife…
…who has had dinner with a Professor Lax at NYU (where she got a PhD. in Math)
…who has had dinner with Svetlana, the daughter of Josef Stalin who defected
…who of course must have had dinner with her father
…who certainly met with, and probably dined with Adolf Hitler.
So now if any of you ever had dinner with me, you will be within six degrees of dinner from Der Fuehrer.
Actually, I’m fairly certain Hitler and Stalin never met.
[Myself and Hitler? In four steps by people who dined together: I had a colleague who was a postwar colleague of Werner Heisenberg, who dined with Albert Speer on at least one occasion during the war and that’s the obvious last link.]
A former roommate of mine is cousin to Bobby Beausoliel, from the Manson Family.
They look alike.
I live within a mile of where some of the victims of the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway, were found. He worked at the Renton, Washington Kenworth plant, the Boeing plant I work at is next door. A former co-worker lived just around the corner from Ridgeway for many years, he described him as a quiet guy that never said much.
One of my best friends from high school was murdered in Texas - I guess we were right out of high school - it would have been the very late seventies. Later we found that her murderer had killed several coeds there.
A friend of mine takes his cat to the same veterinary clinic from which Karla Homolka stole the Halothane used to kill her sister and probably used to drug their 3 other known victims.
Two. One in a minor way. One was not a serial murder, but pretty famous in its own right and I knew three of the people involved.
I left Houston to go to college in Austin in 1966. I met my ex-wife while waiting to take an advanced placement exam at U.T. She was there because her exam had been rescheduled; the one she was supposed to take had been cancelled because Charles Whitman had gone up in the tower that day.
While I was living in Austin in 1969, I read about the death of Joan Robinson Hill. I had met her at some functions my parents had taken me to several years before. I followed the goings-on for a while, but really didn’t pay that much attention to them.
The first time I read Blood and Money , I was astounded, because I had never known all the details. Dr. John Hill was accused of the murder of his wife. His first trial was declared a mistrial, and he was shot to death while waiting re-trial. It was widely assumed that Joan’s stepfather, Ash Robinson, had him hit, but he was never tried. Instead, a woman named Lilla Paulus was tried because she hired the shooter. The chief prosecution witness against her was her daughter, Mary Jo.
I went to high school with Mary Jo and knew her quite well. I had also met her mother at some of the school events.
Two steps from a serial killer, three steps from a famous killer.
The serial killer (can’t remember names or anything, sorry): A friend of mine lived in New Paltz, NY for a little while; while there, she served as a tournament judge for Magic: The Gathering. She became friends with one of the tournament regulars, and even dropped by his house once or twice to play Magic before she got a “creepy” vibe off of him and started avoiding him.
A few months later, the police arrested him on multiple counts of murder and uncovered the bodies of nearly a dozen prostitutes in his attic. My friend says she will always be haunted by two questions: First, were any of those bodies there when she came over to play card games? And second, how the hell did New Paltz have over a dozen prostitutes?
The famous killer: My youngest sister went to high school with Alfredo Tello, who was murdered and dismembered in 1997. That case received nation-wide attention when the murderer- Samuel Sheinbein- fled to Israel and the government refused to extradite him. Sheinbein eventually was tried by Israeli authorities and received a 24-year sentence with possibility of parole, which was considered extremely light given what was done to Tello.
One of Richard Bauhammers’ victims was a student and friend of mine. My father was the investigating and arresting officer in the case of a fellow who had abducted, raped, and murdered several retarded children over the space of a couple years. Several of my coworkers were classmates with John Surrat (sp.?) who is the presumed perpetrator of a string of home invasion rape-murders that took place in Allegheny and Beaver counties in the 1970’s.
You’ve overlooked the fact that Stalin killed far more people than Hitler.