True Crime Stories: Headline Murders In Your Small Hometown?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Not in my hometown, but in Emporia, Kansas, where I went to grad school, a local minister and his secretary murdered their respective wife and husband. There is a TV movie based on it, Murder Ordained, which still shows up on Lifetime every once in awhile. It was filmed in and around Emporia–you can see parts of the university campus, including a building where I used to work and the dorm my best friend lived in, in some shots. The bridge where the wife’s murder takes place, however, was not filmed at the actual scene of the crime; in morbidly curious moments, friends and I would drive out to see “the murder bridge,” and it’s very different. Big, concrete barriers have been put up since the death, which was originally thought to be an accident.

Emporia is also connected to the Clutter family (In Cold Blood) murders; it’s where the killers bought the rope they used to tie their victims up.

42

Not exactly my home town but a few miles up the road from where I grew up in central South Carolina; may I present “Pee-Wee” Gaskins, our very own serial killer.

43

Here in our normally quiet suburb, a former student of Mrs. Kunilou (and occasional baby-sitter for us) was convicted of murdering a store owner during a robbery. He’s serving life.

44

Wow, I read the whole thing. That’s fascinating. And damn creepy, too.

45

In a town about 10 miles or so from where I went to college is the place where the townspeople killed “The Bully”.

There’s a movie about it on Lifetime quite a bit. The “victim” was a horrible guy who terrorized the town. No one could stand up to him, not even officials. If I remember correctly, somebody finally shot him in broad day light, but not a single witness to the crime could be found. We drove over there a couple times, but everyone at school was sure to tell the Freshmen not to ask anybody IN the town about it. They are still very sensitive about it.

Also, in my hometown in Missouri (and this happened WHILE I was away at college) a named Jimmy Peavler was convicted of holding a woman hostage for a while, then directing 2 other people to take her out and kill her. I live in the country, and the body was dumped on my dirt road. The mastermind behind the whole thing was convicted. He’s in prison now. He was a meth dealer, his trailor blew up in the middle of him being investigated and convicted of all this stuff…

Last summer a doctor’s 16 year old kid shot him in the front yard of his house. He’s in the process of being convicted now. They’ve decided to try him as an adult.

That’s all I can think of at the moment.

46

As of 2000, the population of my hometown in Western NY is about 5,000 people. I’m sure there were fewer when I was growing up. One of my high school classmates abducted and murdered a four-year-old girl when we were 22. He was married with children of his own. He admitted to the crime, led police officers to her body, and never said why he did it. Creepy.

When I was in 8th grade, an 84-year-old woman was beaten to death in the woods behind my house. Had our windows been open, I probably would’ve heard something–it was that close. I don’t believe the case has ever been solved.

47

I’m from Petaluma, California (I’m actually there right now, visiting mom and dad and sunshine), a quiet town of 56,000 people 35 miles north of San Francisco. Petaluma’s a mostly white, upper middle-class town with virtually no gang activity, and an average murder rate of zero. It’s a nice place to grow up. Which is probably why this case garnered so much attention.

Summary for those who don’t want to slog through the melodrama of crimelibrary.com:

In 1993, 12-year-old Polly Klaas was kidnapped from her bedroom where she was having a slumber party with two friends. The kidnapper tied her friends up with Nintendo cords, and escaped with Polly out the window. It’s hard for me to tell, because I was so close (about a mile and a half, in fact), but there was a LOT of media. A few months later, Polly’s body was found 20 miles away, in a secluded Santa Rosa area. Her memorial was on the covers of Newsweek, Time, and People. The kidnapper was arrested for something entirely different, and has since been tried and sentenced to death.

Two other things came out of this case. First, it turned out that the police had actually come across the kidnapper the night of the kidnapping, but he claimed to be sightseeing and they left him alone. There were two different bands of the police radio, which broadcast different alerts. One alert mentioned that there had been a kidnapping nearby that evening, and one didn’t. The police in question had the band that didn’t, and let the guy go without even knowing that they were supposed to be on the lookout for a kidnapper. When the communications trip up was revealed, months later, it led to a reorganization of the way cops transmit information.

Secondly, the kidnapper had a long history of sexual abuse, and had been arrested MANY times. (He had an eleven-page long rap sheet.) Outrage over his, well, non-incarceration eventually instigated the enaction of California’s rather infamous Three Strikes Law.

Polly’s dad, Mark Klaas, is now a sort of professional mourner. He pops up on cable news shows whenever anyone is kidnapped. I tend to find him an obnoxious jerk, but apparently no one wants to say that to a guy who had his daughter murdered so brutally.

I was 15 in 1993, and didn’t know Polly. But we were both musicians, and I remember when she was missing, going over to my old junior high to say hi to my former music teacher. I glanced at his attendance book, which was open on the podium, and at Polly’s name, there was just a pencil line drawn across. She wasn’t absent, but she wasn’t there. Years later, when I was a senior in high school and they were freshmen, I got to know the two girls who were with Polly when she was kidnapped. Both are very bright, sweet, and creative people. I will always regret that I never had the chance to know Polly as well.

48

On January 17, 1988, the Stake Center in Marion Utah was bombed. The interior was pretty much destroyed, but the exterior remained standing.
That night it was empty. The weekly Stake basketball game was cancelled. If it hadn’t been, several of the most prominent men in the Kamas Valley would have been killed.
The person behind it was Addam Swapp. The whole thing ended in an FBI Standoff in Marion that lasted several days and resulted in the death of one officer, Fred House.
The backstory is here. It begins with the death of John Singer in a standoff with law enforcement officers when they came up to take the children. He pointed a gun at the officers, and they shot him. One of his wives, Vikki, was taken to jail.
Then 10 years later, Addam Swapp came along and you can find that story here. From the article

The Kamas Valley is rather small, and these lights, etc, kept us all up.

49

Wow, my ex is from Lynn. Where did you grow up?

50

From the local paper, the Ithaca Journal:

“Dec. 22, 1989: Four members of the Harris family are bound and slain in their Ellis Hollow Road home. Their bodies are set on fire. An attempt to burn the house with them fails. A suspect, Michael Kinge, is shot and killed by police. An investigation later reveals that state police officials fabricated evidence in order to implicate Kinge’s mother, Shirley. Kinge’s attorney said last month that he has new evidence to support that state police set out to murder Michael Kinge. Officials have yet to respond to that charge.”

Shirley Kinge used to be my family’s houskeeper in the house we lived in during most of the 80’s. The Harris’s lived and died around the corner from the house we moved to in mid-1989.

Twiddle

51

A few years back, a guy apparently flipped out and stabbed his mom and step-father (or her boyfriend, I don’t remember which) to death while they were enjoying a nice evening of ice cream and television (The papers harped on that part.). He then put his mom’s body in the car and drove her to a shopital 120 miles away, in San Antonio. The house was right down the street from mine, and didn’t sell for a long time after that.

A girl I graduated high school with was murdered about a year after we graduated, by her (ex)boyfriend. Apparently, they’d had problems, and he was one of those “If I can’t have you…” types, and went into her work, shot her in the head, then walked outside and shot himself. It was the first murder-suicide in 20 years or so in that town.

I’ve since moved, but look at the paper now and then. Recently, a kid there murdered his stepmom and buried her behind the house, and was planning on doing the same to his dad when he got home, but didn’t get to.
There was another kid, very recently, who apparently murdered his family and the dog, then burned the house down. I don’t remember if he killed himself as well, and I can’t find the story in the paper online anymore.

52

who killed my godmother’s brother. (About half-way down the page.)

53

I grew up in a crimeless suburb of St. Louis, and the only murder I can recall was the Native America owner of Erlich’s, a jewelry store and leather repair shop. Turns out a burglar broke in and was robbing the place - the owner surprised him and the burglar murdered him with a tomahawk that happened to be on the wall as a decoration. My parents were regular customers of his, and I can still remember playing with the jewelry cases that revolved the shelves and the smell of leather in there.

54

LifeOnWry, my father’s best friend was one of the first state troopers at the Gacy scene. He says he’ll never forget the smell. The officers ended up burning their uniforms.
I live about six blocks from JB’s. The night of the shooting, I had just gotten home when it happened and had about six police cars with full lights and sirens go racing past my house.

55

here’s my little contribution.
My friend Megan lives in Mahopac, NY, which is a pretty small town not too far from NYC. In January she told us all about how her neighbor was arrested for murdering his aunt for an inheritance or something like that (the details are a little foggy…) well that was pretty crazy but the craziness got even crazier!

In french class, this girl Camille, who lives in uh uh uh I think White Plains said that an old lady who was a neighbor of hers was murdered by her nephew!!! It was the same people!:eek:

how weird is that? mind you, this didn’t happen in the town I live in, and granted, white plains is a city, but I go to school there so I guess that kinda counts, right?

56

I grew up (and still live) in Sacramento, CA. In 1996 Eric Leonard (Thrill Killer) murdered 6 people in a two week period. He had a class in the room where I work (a local college).

Dorthea Puente, killed eight of her tennants over on F Street in 1988.

There’s the Good Guys takeover and susequent shootout with Vietnamese gang members in 1991 which left 6 people dead. A good friend’s Mom was one of the officers there that night.

hmmm, who else? Richard Trenton Chase, the vampire killer in 1978…Gerald and Charlene Galego in 1980, Nikolay Soltys killed 6 in 2001, hell, the Unabomber even hit here a couple of times.

I won’t even get started on the people that I know or are/were related to who kave killed, raped, kidnapped or otherwise done naughty things to people. There’s at least 3 of em though.

whew.

57

Since the OP asked for a small town murder (56,000? That is more than our entire county.) here is a small town for you, Elgin, Ohio, population about 75. Betty Jane Mottinger was kidnapped and murdered in 1982. Here is a little bit of information I could find online. It is about halfway down the page talking about John Spirko’s appeal attempts.

58

Ok, now this one’s bizzare. It actually happened last summer (August 2002), and I was working for the solicitor representing the murderer!

Anyway, this elderly man, late sixties, early seventies, murdered his wife. The bizzare thing was that after committing the crime, he got changed, took his dog for a walk, and fed it, and then called the police, and said “I’ve killed my wife”. He’s always admitted it, and in fact, claims that he woke up in the mroning, went into the kitchen to make himself and his wife a cup of tea, and then decided to kill his wife. He took her tea into the bedroom, along with a knife, and told her he was going to kill her. And then killed her.

Very, very bizzare…

59

:eek: Closer connection than mine. Sorry to hear than and hope I didn’t bring up too much of a bad memory. I lived in Orangeburg while he was on the loose, though my family later moved to Sumter where he used to live. I mainly brought him up because I never hear about him even though he seems to have been far, far worse than many of the more “famous” killers.

60

When I was in high school, my family moved briefly from Philomath, Oregon to Salem, Oregon (about 1 hr away). While I was living there, a couple of my previously good friends, Shane Beaver and George Eichner, brutally murdered my former locker partner Nicole Gee. Shane was not convicted, although George said from the beginning that he helped hold and stab her, and years later he allegedly told one of her family members that he had helped kill her. George was sent to a juvenille facility until he was 21, when he was going to be sent to prison. I went to Nicole’s funeral, it was very sad. She wasn’t the nicest person I’ve ever known, but she didn’t deserve to be murdered.

It was like an old folk song or something; they slit her throat and left her in this creek in a park near the high school, and some fifth grade boys found her like an hour later. I never remember him saying this, but apparently George had been talking for a long time about how he wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody. Another friend of mine was kind of dating him and felt that he had intended to kill her as he had asked her out that day, but she couldn’t go.

I’ve tried Google-ing and Yahoo-ing for all of their names and can’t find anything. If anyone has better luck, please let me know. It seems odd to me that all this stuff happened and none of it is on the internet.

Philomath was like Twin Peaks or something, every couple of years there would be some big murder or something. When I was in grade school there was a high school kid who took his girlfriend up behind a friend of mine’s house, shot her and then shot himself. I don’t know either of their names, but we were all sent home early because of it. Another high school girl hung herself and wasn’t found for three days. I heard her name was Roxanne something, but that could be an urban legend. The other incidents were quite, quite real though.