Back before my birth, there was an apparently, um, unstable family living a few houses down; a mother, father, son (in his late teens/early 20s, I think) & a younger, mentally deficient daughter. Maybe a year or two before I was born, the son murdered the father & buried him in a shallow grave at a nearby beach. A bit too shallow, it turned out: The body was discovered & the son was convicted of the murder. I’ll see what I can dig up in terms of specifics.
In other news: My town & the next one over going west share a central high school district - there are two junior highs & three high schools contained therein. Who went to high school in my district (if not my actual high school)?
None other than Amy Fisher, of Long Island Lolita fame.
Then again, Debbie (the artist currently known as Deborah) Gibson went to the other high school in the district that I didn’t attend… Hmm.
In my home town of Cherokee, IA a woman’s body, fully dressed except shoes, was found on the County Courthouse lawn when people came to work one the morning. As far as I know the killing has never been solved and that was going on 50 years ago now.
In my mother’s hometown of South Hill, VA, there used to be this little gas station-shop a few miles up the road from my grandparents house. The same man who owned it when my mother was little still owned it when my mother was little. One night a few years ago, two guys (who knew him, I might add) robbed him at gunpoint and left him tied up in a chair. The shopowner’s son found him the next morning dead from a heart attack – they don’t know it happened during the robbery or afterwards. I don’t know the guys who did it, but my mom knew their family. The shop has been closed and all shut up since then .
When I was 6 we moved to Huntsville Al. My father just landed a job at NASA. The house we neded up moving into went cheap because of a murder. It seems the lady who lived next door got out of the shower, answered the door in a towel and stabbed 23 times.
No one was ever arrested for it.
The somewhat small town [45,000 in the middle of nowhere] is the hometown ofDouble O Swango. He was the valedictorian of the class a year ahead of me. Don’t remember much about the guy, however.
In my hometown of Elgin, IL, we had the disappearance of Brittany Martinez which made state headlines.Scroll down about 3/4 and my apologies for the midi music.
Also, hardygrrl, don’t forget the shooting of a student by another student at Ombudsman Learning Center (over behind where Gromer’s used to be) and the bar shooting at JBs Pub over there on the corner of Lillian and McLean about two years ago.
Nearby, in Carpentersville, the murder of an attorney by his client’s lover a few years back. The attorney’s name was McNamee, but I can’t recall which of the twin McNamee brothers was killed. I know the client was charged with conspiracy, and the boyfriend with the murder.
The owner of a St. Charles, IL petting zoo was charged with conspiracy to commit murder when he apparently hired someone to do away with his lover’s ex (or his ex’s lover, again I forget which.)
Not where I live now, but my two biggest personal brushes with Headline Crimes were both in the late 70s. Eleven days before John Wayne Gacy was arrested for the murder of 48 young men, he was eating lasagne in my mother’s dining room. And a classmate of mine was abducted and murdered by a young man we all knew and hung around with. The murdered girl’s name was very similar to my own, which resulted in a great many people thinking I had been murdered.
A kid who was going to the high school that I would later attend shot both of his parents with a borrowed shotgun before fleeing to Canada. That happened when I was in middle school.
My mom baby-sat a kid who brutally murdered his parents a few years later. He had always been the primary suspect but had never been tried. A couple of years ago he confessed. (http://www.beloitdailynews.com/796/3ill30.htm)
In Lexington, Kentucky, LaFonda Foster and Tina Hickey Powell went on a killing spree one night in 1986 that left five people dead. The event was made into a movie called 100 Proof a couple years ago. As you can probably guess from the title, alcohol was a major factor. While the crime actually happened before I moved to Lexington, I did go to high school with Powell’s daughter.
I live in the same city as Daoloth, so there’s all that stuff he’s said. But a few years ago a man shot his wife, lover, and self in the parking lot of the local hospital. Before that there were the “Queens of Armed Robbery”; not sure if they killed anyone though.
When I was 10, a girl that was in my class was murdered (along with her brother and sister). Kathleen Fredericks/Hodo. Her stepfather had just been released from jail, came home, and killed them. Kathy was shot in the head and, for wont of any other way to put it, was stuffed in the dryer. I am not sure how her sister and brother were left, but the rumors were quite unpleasant. The mother came home while it was still happening, he chased her, but she managed to escape to a neighbors house.
In 1992 a woman and her child were killed in their home right across the street from my parents house, where I was still residing. A teenager skipped school, broke into their house, hung around all day eating their food, watching TV, napping. When she came home, he killed her in her bedroom, then killed the child in the same room. He was apprehended after a chase which went through my parents yard. I was at work when all of this was happening. I received a phone call from my mom telling me they were okay. Hunh? What do you mean? I had to spend the night at a friends house, as the area was cordoned off and the police would not let me in my home.
A family of four was murdered a couple of years ago just a short distance from where I live (Sangenjaya, Setagaya Ward, Tokyo). Despite having blood samples, fibre samples, full clothing descriptions, and footprints all belonging to the murderers, plus a murder weapon covered with fingerprints, the police haven’t turned up squat, and probably never will.
An office worker was beaten to death in Sangenjaya station by three teenagers after getting into an argument with them. They turned themselves in a few days later.
Oh yeah, I forgot. When I was living in Machida, Tokyo, someone was killed by a tiger there. Turned out there was some half-assed animal handler for a movie studio who was keeping a dozen or so wild animals in tiny cages on his property when one of his assistants got mauled.
My hometown of Carthage, Texas, has its share of weirdness, despite having less than 7,000 people. The best one, and the one most likely to have gotten a tiny bit of national attention, was the Tiede case in 1997. An 81-year-old woman, who happened to be quite wealthy, was found shot and stashed in a freezer at her house. Marjorie Nugent been dead in the freezer with four bullets in her for nine months.
Suspicion fell immediately, and correctly, on a live-in friend 42 years her junior, Bernie Tiede (pronounced tee-dee). Mr. Tiede had presided over the funeral of Mr. Nugent, and soon insinuated himself into Mrs. Nugent’s life, eventually moving in with her. He was active in the church and local social activities, and widely regarded as a kind and generous man. He traveled with Mrs. Nugent quite a bit, and she eventually disinherited her children to leave $10 million to him. Then, suddenly, she stopped turning up and he started making excuses for her. Eventually, the house was searched and the body found. It was also found that Tiede had been favoring a small group of local men, giving them money and buying them cars. Home videos were found depicting “illicit sexual acts,” which was their way of saying homosexual. There was a lot of talk around town about powerful people trying to keep all of this under the rug because it could expose their own sex lives. Tiede confessed freely to the murder, shocking all of those who thought that he was a pillar of the community and a wonderful Christian. He also stole something on the order of $3 million.
The stunningly brilliant local DA, with the improbable name of Danny Buck Davidson, is quoted in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times as saying, “No one likes a back shooter. That’s un-Texan,” and “You could call him a back-shooting gigolo.” The kind of weirdness that goes on in a small town would shock many more cosmopolitan folks, and the only real surprise to most intelligent observers was that it hadn’t happened before.
Someone I had known for 10 years had a 3 year old son that was a victim of a murder/suicide in one of those custody battles you hear about but never happen to anyone you know (until they do).
A grown son who lived with his family “up on the hill” (i.e. 2 million dollar houses), killed both his parents and then lead the police on a merry chase through the woods up there for 2 hours. My office got a phone call about it while it was happening. The punch line is that both parents were psychiatrists!
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