I was taking a kid from a delinquency facility to the Marine recruiting station in Phila. in 1967.
As we passed a corner, he said, “I kilt somebody here” and, in response to my questions indicated that it was in gang warfare, and her considered it “kill or be killed.”
A superintendent in our buiilding shot and killed his wife in a fit of jealous rage about fifteen years ago. He fled, but was apprehended and confessed. He put her body in a plastic trash can.
I didn’t have direct contact, but my boyfriend had a regular customer at his auto parts store who he serviced regularly. This quiet, unassuming guy turned out to be one of the most notorious mass murder cases here in Hawaii; he snapped at his Xerox workplace and shot 7 of his co-workers to death.
I’ve had two childhood friends who were murdered.
A kid I grew up with is doing a life sentence for felony murder in Ohio. He was a petty teenage thug miscreant (like me). He (at age 19) and two other lowlifes broke into a house one night to rob it. An elderly woman was home and woke to find them there. She was beaten to death. Not sure if my aquaintence actually did the killing, but it wouldn’t suprise me.
When I was a teenager, I was part of my church’s youth group. After we had been meeting for a few months, a new guy showed up with his girlfriend and sat quietly in the back. After a few meetings, we found out that he was the guy who was currently out on bail for a first-degree murder charge resulting from a parking lot brawl a few months earlier.
I don’t know if he started with the youth group to make a good impression on a judge, or if he decided he needed to clean up his act a bit. He ended up pleading guilty to a second-degree charge. Actually, he’s probably out by now.
Does an almost murderer count? About 20 years ago, a friend fixed me up with a guy who confessed to me that he was actually out on bail. He’d been hired by someone else to kill that guy’s wife - the details have gotten fuzzy over the years, but I think he ratted out the man who hired him. He never did kill the woman.
Our first date was our last. He wound up in prison, then he got religion and wrote to ask my forgiveness or something. It was very weird. My friend did apologize for the setup, and he never introduced me to anyone ever again.
Classmate/pretty good acquaintance in high school killed a lady in a bank robbery. He was about 20 or so at the time. (it was after he had graduated.) He was actually a really nice person, funny and somewhat smart until his Senior year when he started hanging with the wrong crowd.
Former student spent most of his time in my class going through his multi page cell phone and pager bills. Then he disappeared. Seems he robbed the Little Caesar’s where he worked and killed two people.
Another former student sat in my class for three months while awaiting sentencing for beating another kid with a tire iron. Only fast acting, skilled paramedics saved this kid from a murder conviction. Instead, he’s currently doing time for attempted murder.
A girl I dated was shot to death by the cousin of someone I worked with.
And you wonder why people don’t want to spend much time with me…
I spent two weeks in China with a murderer who had gotten away with it. He was a student at Ball State University, and he came with my Chinese class on a tour of China. He claimed to be divorced and was always talking about what a bitch his wife was, and how if he ruled the world there’d be a lot more executions.
A year later we read in the newspaper he’d been arrested. Turns out he’d killed his wife and moved to Indiana and the law was just now catching up with him.
The creepiest part was that he was still angry at her. I’d think murdering someone would really work off your aggression towards them.
No, actually the creepiest thing was that he was a chaperone on the trip.
–John
This woman frequented a gym I used to go to. She had “crazy eyes” and always kind of talked to herself. Saw her on tv a few months later arrested for murdering her much older boyfriend. They found his dismembered body in a park.
Well, there was my great-great-grandfather, but I never met him.
He killed a guy after a day or two of drinking, when they apparently got in an argument. It was a pretty big deal back then, supposedly there was a knife pulled on him and he shot in self-defense, but then the knife disappeared. The guy he shot was from a prominent family and there is insinuation (in the newspaper articles) that this made the knife disappear. He served some jail time and was released, but my family never talked about it. We just learned of this in the last five years or so. This all happened in Arizona before it became a state.
I also have a second or third cousin who killed his wife’s lover by running him down with a cadillac. I see Billy Bob Thornton playing him in the movie. He and his wife have allegedly reconciled while he was in prison. He may have died since. I don’t think that I’ve actually met him, either.
As far as other folks, I know a couple of people who were murdered, one by a neighbor, another by her ex-boyfriend.
hmmm
Well, I once wrote to and received a leter from Charles manson.
And my former brother-in-law was a murderer.
I once worked with a guy who later turned out to be an accessory to a murder case. I don’t remember what it was that he did. We had each left the place where we worked together before this happened and fortunately I didn’t really get to know this guy all that well.
Guy I knew at University was convicted of killing his best friend’s pregnant wife. This was based on the guy’s confession to the male third of a menage a tois. Knew both the guy, and the confessor, but the whole thing never seemed to add up.
Guy was doing 20 years in Folsom, and actually should be out right about in another 2-3 years.
My father was college buddies of the Unabomber. These three guys used to hang out in a cafe together. Like Ted K., my father and the other man (we’ll call him “Bob”) were exceptionally brilliant when it came to academia, but were shockingly self-centered and truly unable to relate to the rest of the world on any kind of compassionate level. It’s quite possible that my father and “Bob” suffered from a personality disorder such as a Narcissistic Disorder.
Unlike Ted K., neither my father nor “Bob” became homicidal. They both died estranged from their families and fairly young because they would do little else but drink and “study.” (There was a nicotene stain over my father’s chair because he spend all day sitting in his armchair reading – he never had a permanent full-time job.)
All three men lost touch after grad school, long before Ted K. started making letter-bombs.
Also, my ex-boyfriend discovered that Ted Bundy ran a small business from prison. Send him your photo and he’d send you back a drawing (and return the photo). So my ex has a drawing of himself as rendered by Ted Bundy.
Yuck. When I was a freshman in college, there was a guy in my social circle who I think was (I think) a senior at another local university. He was amazingly popular, had a reputation for having the best parties, very wild but in a creative and fun-loving sort of way, etc etc. I remember sitting around with my girlfriends, trying to scheme up ways to esesntially tag along after him, hoping he would notice us.
About five years after college (so almost 10 since I knew him), I saw on the news that he was arrested for murdering a young man over a bad drug deal. He then chopped the body up in little pieces, hoping the evidence wouldn’t be discovered.
I always feel particularly icky when I think about this, because not only did I know him, but I actively tried to pursue a closer friendship with him. Thank GOD I was a lowly freshman and almost completely off his radar.
There’s this guy who I talk with occasionally at a bar me and my buddies frequent. Once day he tells us that when he was cab driver in NYC he was robbed at gunpoint by some guy.
Months pass, and he driving around, and he sees that same guy who robbed him. He checks that there’s no one around, and runs the guy down with his cab.
He could have been making up the story for some reason, and it’s possible the guy survived, but my gut feel is that he killed that guy.
My sister dated a guy for a while. I met him and hung out with them some times. (I was in 9th or 10th grade) After she dumped him, he started stalking her. As this was before stalking laws not much could be done.
Too bad because my freshman year in college he murdered my dad.
When I was back in high school in the 80’s in Rhode Island, I’d gotten into theater for a bit. I auditioned for a play (Ten Little Indians, I think). There was one other guy going out for the same part as I was, a big heavyset guy.
He got the part. He was arrested some weeks later, for killing a young boy. There were rumors that he’d eaten him as well.
It was a well-publicized case at the time, but I’ve forgotten the guy’s name. Anybody remember this case?
It’s funny that this came up now… I posted a thread last May about how my brother’s friend had been arrested for murder. Just last week the guy was found guilty of manslaughter (he claimed his wife had come at him with a knife). I haven’t heard what he has been sentenced to.
Eleven or twelve years ago, I worked as a barman here in Dublin. Three sisters used come in every Sunday night and they would flirt with me quite a lot, although they were significantly older than me (I was around 18 at the time). One Sunday they told me they were going to a nightclub after the pub. Being young and stupid, I decided to go as well but I hadn’t the guts to go alone. So I roped in my good friend, Yojimbo. We showed up at the club and chatted and danced with the sisters. One of them mentioned that I shouldn’t get too close as her husband wouldn’t be too pleased. It never went beyond flirting and we parted company at the end of the night.
A couple of years later, one of Dublin’s most notorious criminals, Martin Cahill, was shot dead by the IRA. There was huge publicity and pictures of his funeral were widely circulated. Our friends from the nightclub were featured prominently. One of them was married to him and he had children with the two others (his domestic arrangements were quite unusual). The nightclub we were in was less than half a mile from his house. He was never convicted with murder but you can get a full account of his often violent adventures in two major motion pictures - The General, with Brendan Gleeson and Ordinary Decent Criminal with Kevin Spacey. Obviously, Yojimbo was thrilled I involved him.
Also, a friend of mine lived with a guy who had been very active in the IRA in the 1970s. I met him a few times - he’s a university lecturer in Irish nowadays. He served 12 years in Ireland and is still wanted in the UK for bombings carried out in Britain. The terms of the Good Friday Agreement don’t apply to him as he never served time in the UK. He still can’t cross the border.
One of my employees here is related to Pee Wee Gaskins. His grandfather’s sister was Pee Wee’s mother (his great aunt?).
Now I’m worried…