The US national murder rate appears to be about 5 per 100,000 per year. Assuming 40 years of lifetime experience one would expect to have experienced 1 murder for someone you “know” if you “know” 500 people. Given the whole friends of friends and relatives of relatives and fellow far flung coworkers in megacorp, “knowing” somebody who was murdered seems to me to not be an unlikely thing.
Yeah, I don’t know anyone who’s been murdered either. Even just counting deaths without foul play, the closest ones I can think of are a high school classmate a few years younger than me who rode her moped without a helmet and got hit by a minivan and a friend’s mom who had MS. Everyone else I know is still alive.
As mentioned before I have two that I know from my personal life. As a police officer I have professional knowledge of all the murders that have happened in this town for the last 15 years. The town (over 60,000) has probably averaged 1 a year. I’d have to look it up. I know there have been several years when there were none. Several years when there were more than one so it evened out. Almost all were from family members or domestic situations. Only one was a stranger.
I worked with Bernd Jürgen Brandes, the guy who volunteered to be killed and eaten by Armin Meiwes.
I’d known Dawn Breedon for about 20 years when her three year old son was the victim of a murder by his father, who then committed suicide.
A friendly acquaintance from high school was picked up by cops for cocaine possession and ended up killing two policemen and a dispatcher in my small hometown, all of whom I knew. I grieved for all four of them – the criminal (whom I had liked in high school) for wasting his life like that, and the three men he killed who were all rather decent sorts.
Those are the only people who’ve been murdered that I knew. I’ve known a few girls who were victims of burglary/rape (by strangers with guns) and several suicide victims, but just that murder.
My cousin was a member of the Hell’s Angels in California decades ago. Things didn’t end well and they never found who murdered him and apparently cut him into several pieces.
A guy I knew growing up got married and they had a daughter. He used to be sort of a nerd, but grew into a studly looking guy and fell in love with a student at the college where he was teaching. His wife took it badly and killed their daughter and tried to commit suicide. She lived and spent a few years in jail.
I was a neighbor of a guy in NYC and we got to be good friends and he and his then wife came to perform (dance company) in Berlin and stayed with me. I found out years later than he and his new girlfriend went missing and there had been some arguments with the landlord. It was front page news in NYC for a few weeks - they searched everywhere for the bodies with no success. The mother of his girlfriend has been relentless and has had the case brought up every couple of years to see if it could be solved, but with no success.
Too late for an edit, but here is a link to the NYC story. I lived at the 76 Pearl Street apartments for a year.
I worked closely with a woman whose son was shot in the head by an 11 year old girl who wanted to play with his video game.
She told him she would shoot him if he didn’t give it to her. She climbed onto a closet shelf to get the gun, then got the key to a cabinet in the garage to get the bullets, loaded the gun then came back to the room, put the barrel to his head and shot him. She told all this to the investigators. She also told them she knew he would die, and that’s what she wanted. She said he should have shared.
She spent 16 weeks in juvie. At her sentencing, her mother yelled at my friend, “Look what you’ve done to my baby girl!”
It still makes me sick to my stomach.
This is one of the most shocking and disheartening stories I’ve ever heard. The reaction of the girl’s mother is horrible, too.
Shouldn’t schools be teaching ethics, empathy, and compassion?
Those are supposed to start at home. In the words of a wise woman, “I expect schools to teach my children, but it’s me who’s got the job of raising them.”
I vaguely knew someone who survived a murder attempt by ETA and someone else who spent time in jail for belonging to ETA’s support structure; I’ve also known several people who commited suicide. No succesful murders, though.
The closest I have been to a murder victim was at my wife’s church, back when we were still dating. A man in the congregation killed his wife and kids in the house, and then evaded police. He’s still wanted now, over a decade later. I don’t know any of the victims’ names.
We’re fairly certain my step-grandmother was murdered, or at the very least was the victim of a sleazy operator who did nothing to help her in extremis.
My father was her stepson and only child of any kind. They were not close, but he made regular duty visits to her and did his best to “go through the motions” as a son (she married his father when he was 12). In the 2-3 years before her death at age 77, she had become quite taken with a young “gardener” who spent lots of time with her and got into her good graces. He had connections to England, that’s about all we know about him from our distant relationship.
Although she was in good health for a woman her age, one day my grandmother was found dead of heart failure in her kitchen.
Before the body was found, but AFTER she seemed to have died/been in her death throes, there were phone records showing telephone calls to the UK from her house.
She left a lot of her substantial wealth to the gardener. My dad got nothing - though we aren’t the kind of people that get upset over that. I was raised to believe that you should not expect any inheritance; a good thing, since none of that grandmother’s money will ever reach me!
The evidence is circumstantial, but it seems likely that: gardener gained grandmother’s trust and made sure he was prominent in her will; gardener, perhaps with help from a UK-based accomplice, found way to do her in; gardener called accomplice in UK while my grandmother was dying or dead.
It’s such a creepy story and I wish I were in a position to force the issue. But my grandmother had no advocates; for my dad, it was the end of a long sad family relationship and he just wanted out. I don’t know if anyone spoke to the police about this or if they ever investigated.
I think there is a good chance somebody got away with murder.
Around Christmas 2009 (the exact date is not known) a colleague of mine, a fellow patent examiner at the European Patent Office, was brutally murdered in his own home in Rijswijk, The Netherlands.
He was Italian, and in the end it came out that the murder had been arranged by his estranged wife, who hired two goons to get rid of her husband. He was apparently about to obtain a divorce cutting her out of everything (it seems that the wife was a rather nasty piece of work). A really sad story; the guy was nice, if a bit eccentric.
In the meantime, it was fascinating to see a lot of newspapers and news outlets (not to mention tons of websites of the “conspiranoid” persuasion) that promoted my colleage to head of the E.P.O., made him into a famous nuclear physicist who was on the verge of some momentous discovery (he had a bee in his bonnet about Einstein’s theory of special relativity being wrong, and had written some articles about it, but that was it), and speculated on whether the C.I.A. or the Mossad had had him whacked to prevent him from disclosing something tremendous about nuclear weaponry and what have you.
This is the only person relatively close to me that was murdered.
I know other people who killed themselves, including a friend at the University who I am almost certain died during a session of autoerotic asphyxiation gone awry.
Although I have a cousin who is a criminal, a conman and an all-around not recommendable guy… He is also tremendously inept, and I am half-expecting that one day he will be killed because he got involved in something that was too big for him.
This might make for an OP in a spinoff thread about “disreputable relatives” and the like. To my best knowledge I’m not kin to any heinous criminals, but I do have some shady characters and people I wouldn’t lend money to among my bloodline and in-law collection. And as for folks I know – but am not kin to – I could share some grisly stories!
I’ll leave it to somebody else to start such a thread. 
I used to hang with a rough crowd, so I’ve known maybe 4 or 5 people who were murdered, plus one girl who survived a night after being tossed into a dumpster with her skull broken. The one I knew the best was the survivor, but she was never right afterwards due to brain damage.
I’m really shocked at this thread - it does seem like I live a much more sheltered life than I realized.
I have known, in a nodding acquaintance sort of way, a few homeless library patrons who have been killed in fights and such.
It’s possible that my half-brother murdered his wife, although there’s no proof.
I did, I’m sure, wave often at a guy in a house across the street when I was running or walking my dog who turned out to be a classic sociopath who murdered a well-loved local teacher, but I don’t think that counts as I never met her and I don’t think I ever spoke to the guy.
The brother of a childhood friend is still in jail serving a life sentence for murdering a transient girl.
A girl who had a crush on me in high School, and who I basically used to make my girl friend at the time jealous, was murdered about 5 years ago by her John. Apparently she had started on a downward spiral of drugs and prostitution a few years after I last saw her.
Exactly my situation too, although in our case the prosecutor made sure the family would be okay with a manslaughter plea (we were, we didn’t want to have to go through a trial).
All I can say is that it’s a very surreal experience to be caught up in.
My then-Gf’s cousin was gunned down in parking lot in a drug deal gone bad.
A girl I was friendly with, but not really friends with in high school was kidnapped and murdered by an ex-boyfriend a few years after we graduated.