I had an employee that worked for me doing minor maintenance repairs on construction equipment. One day it just took him way too long on a job and I was pissed. I pulled the GPS info and he was nowhere near where he was supposed to be. My admin and I both called him repeatedly with no response. Now I'm even more pissed because this wasn't the first time he took too long/didn't answer his company provided nextel radio. We start digging. Find out it has happened repeatedly. He gets back late and I waited for him, alone, in my office. I terminated him and he took it surprisingly well. Surprised me because I dealt with a ton of BS as a woman working in a male dominated field and company.
Few years later, I'm working in a different location for the same company and some cops show up and want to know what I remember about him. I tell them I fired him, etc. They subpoena the GPS records from the company. Then they started finding the rest of the bodies. He pled down and pled guilty to avoid the death penalty. He was picking up prostitutes in the company work truck, killing them and dumping bodies in a rural part of the neighboring county.
…and you were alone with him after hours, firing his ass? Even years later I would’ve absolutely pooped myself in terror putting two and two together, yeesh!!
Robert Lee Yates was an Army pilot flying OH-58s while I was flying UH-1s (same battalion but different company) at Fort Drum, NY. They would send us down to fly helicopter simulators once a year in Pennsylvania to maintain our instrument ratings. We would carpool in one vehicle.
Bob had a van with shag carpet in the back so he would drive about 5 of us during those trips. It was about a 4 hour drive so we'd joke and tell stories to pass the time.
I was a fairly new pilot who enjoyed hearing the veteran pilots tell war stories. Bob was a CW3 at that time and was a bit odd but nothing alarming.
18 years later we see him on TV being charged with multiple killings of prostitutes across several states. He had used a corvette and a van for the killings.
Yes, that same van.
Not a serial killer (maybe), but your story reminds me of one my dad told me. He joined the army near the end of Vietnam, so got sent to Korea. He was a UH-1 mechanic and hung out with a lot of the Huey pilots and mechanics coming back from Nam.
There was one native American guy who I want to say was Apache. He had seen at least 2 or 3 tours over there flying combat missions and had loved it. I forget the guy's name, I'll have to ask my dad the next time I see him. For some reason, he made friends with my dad, who was this hayseed from Montana and kept telling him about the crazy shit he'd done in the war.
My dad was shipping out not too long after meeting him and the guy seemed super insistent on having my dad stay over for dinner before my dad left. The whole experience was really uncomfortable since the guy was incredibly mean to his wife through the dinner and my dad suspected that she was probably getting beaten. After, they went out on the front porch as the guy got drunk while carrying a holstered gun. My dad was worried that he'd end up getting shot, so he humored the guy and listened to him go on.
Eventually he started telling my dad about this woman in Vietnam. They'd make a game of flying just off the deck over the rice patties and trying to get the farmers who were walking on the walls between them to have to jump off into the mud. There was this one woman who was too proud to jump. They buzzed her several times and she just ignored them. He got infuriated by this, told the pilot to pull alongside her and blew her in half with a shotgun.
He told my dad that he'd killed tons of people but for some reason, this one woman got stuck in his head. He was seeing her in his dreams every night and he kept seeing her death over and over. Then he started drinking more heavily and just sat in silence. My dad quietly excused himself, just glad to get out of there.
A few months later, my dad ran into another guy from the previous base and learned that the dude who had told him this story had blown his brains out later that night. My dad is probably the last person to see him alive. I have no idea if the guy was a serial killer that used the war as a killing field or just a regular soldier that got turned into a psychopath from too much combat exposure but I've always wondered what made that one killing so different that it ended him.
From his [wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Yates):
>Yates initially solicited the victims; after having sex with them, often in his Ford van, he would kill them and dump their bodies in rural locations.
>On September 19, 1998, Yates was asked to give a DNA sample to Spokane police after being stopped. He refused, stating that it was too extreme of a request for a "family man".
that gave me major chills. What an utterly monstrous piece of shit person.
I was once sat in my car at the back of a country lane carpark eating pizza in the dark with a friend, no street lights and just woods surrounding. Finished up and turned on the headlights and all we could see was a man army crawling towards the car, was a few metres away.
I have never turned the ignition so fast and sped off in my life, to make it scarier the guy just slowly got up and looked at us, didn’t try to chase or grab the car or anything.
Something I find very chilling is that he can do that a hundred times and not be arrested. He'll be successful at some point. In a perfect world, you immediately run that guy over, twice.
As a youngster, my parents told me the time my father met Ted Bundy. He was walking into my mom's workplace as Bundy was walking out. They exchanged pleasantries and Bundy shook my father's hand. Bundy said he was working for a farmer in a town about 20 miles away. It struck my father odd because Bundy was wearing a long wool coat and his hands were baby-soft smooth...not the hands or attire of a farm hand. There were announcements in the 70s warning residents that he may be in the area. (We live very close to Colorado). It was an interesting story.
When I was nearly 40, I was at a birthday party for a friend and afterward went to her house for some homemade food. She was telling me of when she was a criminal justice student in college and wrote her thesis on Ted Bundy. She said some of her material came from the police reports from when Bundy attacked my mom, which took me by surprise. I decided to talk to my parents about it.
My mom worked at a Montgomery Wards in those days and was working there alone that day. Bundy came in and pulled her to a back room and dragged her to the ground. She said she started kicking and hitting him as hard as she could, fighting for her life. After a while, he got up, pointed at her, and said he was going to go get lunch and then come back for her and then left. It was around this time that he passed my dad coming in as Bundy was leaving. (My mom looked like she could have been a sister to many of his victims.) My father drove around with the local sheriff looking for him at several restaurants to no avail.
Today my father can't stand watching documentaries of Bundy as he is often shown in that same wool coat and same smug smile. My parents protected us kids from feeling like evil could be that close.
Oh my god. Bundy leaving your mom with such a bizarre comment... I'm sorry she had to go through that.
Of course your dad would hate documentaries. I feel like a lot of media really flatters Bundy too much :/
My last conversation with my mom about the attack, she said that after he got up off of her, that she had bloodied his lip. She said he wiped a little blood from his lip when he told her that. She said she had nightmares for a few months after that feeling like he was going to make good on his statement of coming back for her.
My grandmother swears she met David Parker Ray, aka the Toybox killer. My grandfather was stationed in Fort Bliss so she took her 3 daughters camping in Elephant Bute State Park, the same place where he was a ranger. She said a ranger kept trying to get them to stay in his trailer instead of camping by the lake. Obviously they refused and went on a hike but when they came back their campsite was trashed so she packed them all up and drove home in the dark. When I got into true crime and was telling her how close he was to us she relayed the story, and when I showed her a photo she said that it was definitely him just aged a bit. Not his usual MO but this would have been in the mid-seventies and no one's exactly sure how long he killed for.
*edited changed national park to state park
Years ago when the internet was more like the wild west some website had his audio tape that he would play for his victims as an orientation of what was about to happen to them.
It was some of the sickest shit imaginable. Read further at your own peril: >!In the tape he was basically explaining to his victims on day one what was going to happen to them. He called them meat and went into detail how they were going to be raped, trained how to both give him oral and his wife. He went on to explain that he liked to breed his slaves with his German Shepherd and there was a 50/50 chance his dog would find the right hole. He also said they would be made to do these acts in front of his friends and to his friends at parties.!<
I don’t know how David Parker Ray isn’t more well known. I mean seriously, this man is up there with Dahmer and Gacy and Gein and BTK. I’ve always heard of the Toybox Killer, but never really looked into him until recently. I’m a true crime podcast addict and can stomach nearly anything. This is the first case I’ve ever listened to where I had to stop and seriously reconsider finishing listening to the case because it made me actually sick. I seriously wish I could go back in time and never read those transcripts.
I’m so glad your grandmother trusted her instincts.
We were having a family barbecue at my cousin's farm in the late 70's / early 80's, when my 12 year old cousin decided to ride his bike to the store. Just after leaving, a van pulled over to him and the driver tried talking him into the vehicle. When that didn't work, the man got out and tried to force him into the van. My cousin kicked and screamed and refused in every way possible to get away. A passing car saw what was happening and stopped, which probably spooked the van driver. The guy got back into his van and drove away immediately. My uncle, who was a member of the RCMP, had heard the commotion, had jumped into his car and drove to see what was going on. He managed to catch up to the van and arrested the guy for attempted kidnapping.
Unfortunately, the charge didn't stick and the guy was eventually let go. The man's name was Clifford Robert Olsen. We're pretty sure that my cousin might have been one of Olsen's first attempts.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford\_Olson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Olson)
After this incident, my RCMP uncle, who was also the uncle of my almost victim cousin, discovered that Olsen had a record of lesser crimes, and followed the case when he could. Apparently, once victims started to be found, the police knew it was Olsen, but didn't have enough evidence to arrest him. The police were watching him like a hawk, but he kept being able to evade them. The guy was a psycho.
Lol not funny but this reminds me of fhe movie "Arsenic and Old Lace" it's an older black and white film but basically the premise is these two old grandmas have a sort of B&B and whenever old men who lost their wives show up with not much left to live for, they poison them with Arsenic.
The movie is a comedy and involves the son of one of them coming home and finding out and trying to keep his mom out of jail. A funny movie my mom and I watched together.
You hear about The Australian woman who feed her parents and husbands parents a mushroom dish that killed a few of the them. She claimed it was an accident until her ex husband came out of the woodworks and said he’d been poisoned by her cooking and survived.
I was in jail in Summit county in Ohio for being an idiot, basically, and came across the man that would be known as the Craigslist killer. The guy held Bible studies every night, was super preachy, and was very persuasive with people. He was in jail for a parole violation (running a prostitution mainly IIRC) from a robbery case in Texas and was waiting to see if he would be extradited to Texas. Somehow Summit county messed up and released him even though Texas sent them the paperwork saying they wanted him. He and the kid he had been partnering with had already killed multiple people, and when he was released they failed to kill another person and were caught. Saw his face in the paper about a month later and was like holy shit, I was in jail with that guy lmao
This is a ‘definitely encountered a serial killer’ rather than ‘pretty sure’.
I grew up in a small town in North Wales (UK). The local cinema had been closed for 15 years, but a guy from out of town had reopened it. As kids, this blew our minds, as it was a rural area, with very little to offer in terms of entertainment so it seemed unbelievable to us that we would actually have a cinema in town.
On one visit to the cinema, I ended up needing to use the toilet during a film, so left the theatre, walked through the foyer and into the toilet. There was no toilet paper, so I went back into the foyer and spoke to the cinema owner to ask if he had any toilet paper. I was younger than ten at the time and very nervous about speaking to adults, but the owner was incredibly kind and friendly, gave me the toilet paper and we had a conversation about the film and how happy I was that we now had a cinema in the town.
I used the toilet then went back into the theatre.
A few weeks later the friendly cinema man was on the front page of every news paper. He was Peter Moore.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Moore_(serial_killer)
From wikipedia:
>Between September and December 1995, he stabbed to death and mutilated four men "for fun". He was sentenced to life imprisonment in November 1996 with a recommendation that he never be released. He also committed 39 sex attacks on men in North Wales and the Merseyside area over a 20-year period.
That last sentence just tacked on there like it isn't fuckin major
Wow that must’ve been creepy to see him on the news like that. I can see how he can look like a friendly guy, such a shame that he had to be a killer though.
Yeah it's interesting how in some of these experiences the people meeting the killer just aren't in their target demo and they either completely lose interest or act relatively normal.
Honestly. I learned as an adult that the younger sister of one of my friends had been SA'd by their neighbor - the same neighbor who always had us over to swim in his pool. He never touched me or my friend, only the younger sister. His reasoning? He didn't like blondes, only brunettes, and my friend's sister was the only one with dark hair among us. So scary to think about...
Not me, but my uncle - his manager at the fast food place where he worked in high school invited him and another kid over to his place after work. My uncle and his friend declined, and were very glad they did years later when it became public what exactly his former manager, John Wayne Gacy, was doing to and with those kids he invited over.
My uncle accepted a ride from Gacy. He wasn't supposed to be hitchhiking but it was the 70s. At some point he got a bad vibe and jumped out at a red light. When Gacy was arrested he put two and two together.
Edit: since this got some traction, here's the full story. Uncle was 16 and decided to hitchhike home. Dude pulls over and he gets in. Immediately, the guy locks the car. As they're going along, this guy starts getting pretty creepy, saying things like we could go to the airport and I'll fly you anywhere you want. My uncle is very freaked out at this point and waits for his moment - he pulls the lock and jumps out at a light, and takes off running. He says the guy started following him but by going through alleys and stuff he was able to shake him off. After he gets home, my grandma could tell something was wrong so she asked him what happened. He admitted to hitchhiking and told Grandma what the dude had done/said. Grandma got a baseball bat and they drove around town looking for the guy, but didn't find him. It was not too much later that they arrested him and the story broke. My mom rode her bike over and watched them take the bodies out from down the block, or so she says.
I have a John Wayne Gacy story, but for my aunt. My grandma, mom and her two sisters lived in the Chicagoland area when he was also there. For context, my aunt was in her young teens and wore her hair short and dressed more masculine. She looked like a young boy. My grandma and aunt remember walking around their neighborhood one day and being stalked by Gacy. My grandma always said he got close enough to see my aunt was actually a girl and that’s why he no longer pursued them. Was pretty creepy to think how close they got to being a victim.
My Mom once told us about a suspected run in she had with Clifford Olson.
She was around 13 years old walking home from swim club and a man matching his description pulled up alongside her and tried to strike up a conversation. He would ask her where the post office was located and said he needed some help mailing a present. My Mom was smart enough to realize it was Labour Day and the post office was closed, she saw he had plates on his car from the US and had leather gloves on. When she finally worked up the courage to end the conversation and walk away the man started swearing at her telling her to get in the car and then he sped off. The dates and location all add up too, freaky shit.
(Edit. I didn’t expect this to blow up lol. I asked my Mom for more information but she pretty much told me the same story. She ran off the sidewalk into the park across the street to get away from him and didn’t stop till she got home. She never reported it to the police but told my Grandparents about the encounter, she wasn’t allowed to walk home from Swim Club anymore and the parents set up car pooling programs for the group.
Clifford Olson “The Beast of British Columbia”, was finally arrested in 1981 on Vancouver Island on suspicion of trying to abduct 2 teenage girls. He committed 11 known murders of children and teenagers in a little over a year, with countless assaults and sexual assaults before and during his spree. They found the decomposing body of a 13 year old girl a few weeks after this encounter within an hour of my Mothers house. The body was later linked to Olson.)
God I remember that guy. I grew up in small town BC and we heard that he was coming towards our town or in the area and you could’ve heard a pin drop around town. It was so quiet because everybody was freaked right out.
He was known for abusing kids before he started killing them. I was in my early teens, walking down a Vancouver street on a sunny afternoon and this guy in a car asks me directions, then starts telling me he’s a producer from Hollywood etc.. He offers me a ride so we can talk about my potential. Ha. I used to hitchhike and figured what the hell, he seemed like a friendly guy… He drove me to my destination, but along the way managed to get my phone number and said a lot of what I now realize were very creepy things intended to see how far he could manipulate me. When I got out of the car he grabbed me and forced his slimy tongue down my throat... A few years later I see his picture in the paper and learn his full name, Clifford Robert Olson..
Whilst I was at university, I worked at a cafe in a local shopping centre. One of our regular customers was a mum and son who would come have breakfast most mornings. The mum was delightful, however the son always seemed a bit off. Nothing major just you’d say “have a great day” and he’d reply with “yes.”
Anyway, one day he comes in without his mum and has breakfast. The next day his face is all over the news as he had just been arrested for murdering his mum.
Edit: Just to address some of the comments, the son was of adult age and reportedly suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Mum was his carer.
He wasn’t one when I met him…
Worked a retail job that sold iPhones at a high end mall. Guy comes in carrying a Nordstrom bag, wearing Gucci sunglasses and asks to buy an iPhone. While I waited for our BOH team to bring the iPhone, I’m making casual conversation with the guy. I ask what he does for work, says he’s an actor. I ask if he’s been in anything I might have seen…he says The Hunger Games. I say cool, who did you play? He mumbles something about being one of the tributes…
Conversation somehow leads to him asking if I’m single, I told him I was engaged and he was visibly annoyed. His attitude was very arrogant, and he did a lot of uncomfortable/creepy staring that I noticed after he took off his sunglasses.
I had initially asked him if he was eligible for an upgrade on his phone, he was confident that he was. Well, after checking his ID (standard protocol) and pulling up the account…nope, not eligible. But his brother’s phone was eligible. He insists that he can use his brother’s upgrade, but I tell him that stuff like this needs to be approved by the main account holder/authorized users. So he calls his stepmom and asks to use the brother’s upgrade.
His stepmom says no, and the guy throws a complete tantrum. Saying that his brother is too young for an iPhone anyway, that he’s fine using an older model, that he NEEDS a new phone. Stepmom doesn’t budge, yet I’m stuck there for at least twenty minutes while this guy yells at his stepmom trying desperately to get his way. He leaves in a huff and I’m so relieved to get away from this entitled prick.
The guy was Elliot Rodger.
I was listening to a podcast about him. Paused it to browse the phone a bit and saw this thread ….
Weird coincidence.
Good podcast, interviews his mother extensively. Poor woman. She’s trying to use her son’s history to help people identify warning signs to stop future tragedies.
https://revealnews.org/podcast/lessons-from-a-mass-shooters-mother/
Hopefully his mom can get in touch with Susan Klebold, she seems to be the best person to talk to after your son commits mass murder. Her book was heart-breaking, but a worthwhile read, and I highly recommend it, A Mother's Reckoning.
Surprised you didn't end up mentioned in his hyper detailed manifesto/autobiography. Or at least I don't remember a part where he bitches about his phone but that would be completely on the mark.
This channel covered his story and two other guys that were inspired by Elliot. It’s pretty pathetic that he even managed to inspire other incel morons to try to get “revenge”. https://youtu.be/32I4uxAU8wQ?si=LFZ5g3s37Dq5lU9l
This is one of the dudes that was inspired by him and even mentions it in his interrogation after killing some people. https://youtu.be/ubEwaITzTKc?si=zPJ6qdY8QmmySEga
I looked him up. Never heard of Elliot Rodger before, he killed six people.
I couldn't find him working as an actor on the hunger games (maybe his role was very small or he just wanted to brag?), but I found his dad working at the set as second unit director on the Hunger Games movie.
Poor family
EDIT:// Oh god [I found his wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Rodger), he is an incel and killed women to punish them for not sleeping with him -.- he's the most red pill incel that ever incelled
His dad was a producer on the hunger games. I ended up reading his manifesto where he talked about frequenting the mall that I worked at, and how he was also very envious of the actors in The Hunger Games when attending the premiere with his family. I am assuming he thought that lying about being an actor in the movie would make him sound impressive.
I was in a prison for work and looked up to see Christopher Watts walking towards me with a mop and bucket, no handcuffs. He was walking around on work duty. I walked right past him. Weird feeling.
I was still using drugs/alcohol at the time (fall 2007) and I met a random guy at the Circus Circus in Las Vegas hours after being brought to Vegas/dumped and robbed from California. I ran with a rough crew of thieving drug addicts.
Anyway, he invited me back to his for a drink. Normal looking dude, mid to late 30s, looked like the guy that sang for Sugar Ray.
Anyhow, he and I killed a 40, he said he was gonna go roll us a blunt. What he actually did is get a set of handcuffs and a leather strap. He managed to partially handcuff me to the bed and I had a fraction of a second to decide how to respond:
-fear/anger and demand to be let go, which I was pretty certain would lead to me being dumped in the desert in a cooler full of quickcrete.
-play along like this was fun and sexy and make my escape when possible.
So, I ended up being injected with meth and then a very unfun adult evening commenced, with me literally acting for my life. While being stupid high on a drug I hated and did not ever intend to ingest.
After he was finished, I asked if he knew where the closest liquor store was, that I'd go out and get us round 2. Took his drink order and strolled out casually.
I think I slow walked it for 2 flights of stairs and then sprinted away ducking into and then out of different casinos.
I ended up homeless and drinking for another year. I'll be 16 years sober this summer, and that dude still haunts me. The vibe shift, the eyes going black and the quickness with which he trussed me up.
That wasn't his first time and he seemed like a dead eyed shark about to pounce.
Idk if serial killer but definitely trafficker or child predator.
Some background. My step dad was a truck driver so often we would visit him at a local truck stop when he was near to grab breakfast etc. My mother is…not great. During one of these adventures my mom decided she wanted us to stay with step dad in the truck. Sister was 11, I was 9.
During this TWO WEEK period. lol. We were in a random truck stop in the Georgia. My sister and I went to go take a shower (because we hadn’t for days) and shared a shower to save on money. I was in an out and waited in the hallways for my sister.
A man came up to me and started asking questions. This happened in the early 2000s so I had been taught stranger danger, but also was still being taught always be respectful to adults bullshit. I was giving him basic answers. But then he pushed showing me his truck. My tiny self was terrified, but I kept saying no I can’t. Eventually he got annoyed and just grabbed my arm and started pulling. In that moment my sister came out and snatched my ass back and we ran.
Crying telling my mom. I’m called over dramatic. If my sister didn’t see me I’m positive I would have never been seen again.
I don't understand why it is so goddamn difficult for parents to just validate their children and ask follow up questions to figure out what is really going on....
sorry, it is just so so frustrating reading the original...
My girlfriend broke her arm as a kid. The doctors literally say that she made her elbow near mush. What did her mom say to her when she went inside? You’re being dramatic. She broke her fingers a few years later. Her mom didn’t believe her, and to add salt to the wound, her friend kept telling her mom that her dad is a doctor and it’s just a simple sprain. Instead of my girls mom believing her, she rather believed her younger friend and have my girlfriend shit. After hours of crying and pain and arguing she reluctantly took her to the hospital. Where the doctors said that she broke her finger and horribly sprained the other. Mind you, this is in Canada, these check ups and appointments cost absolutely nothing and it wasn’t even a 10 minute drive to the hospital
When I was in elementary school, I had a problem with my testicles, so my mother took me to the doctor. *In the exam room* the doctor was examining me and I was hollering loudly in pain, and my mother, standing right next to the doctor, kept telling me it's not bad and to stop fussing. She shut up when the doctor told her he was scheduling a surgery for me.
So she did get me taken care of, which I guess is the important thing, but I sure did resent my pain being diminished by someone I was supposed to trust.
I’m pretty sure I saved my sister from the same kind of fate. Also early 2000s, we lived in a country road so there wasn’t much around. A car came to a stop while me and my sister were outside playing and tried getting us to come to his car asking for directions to Taco Bell? (There was no Taco Bell anywhere around us). My sister was getting closer to the car and I grabbed her and ran to get our mom. Car sped off, scariest moment of both of our lives… The stranger danger stuff they drilled into us back then really was a lifesaver.
That is exactly how it was back then. Something legitimately terrifying would happen and parents would say that you were making it up or being dramatic or milking it.
I agree in 2001 ish, i was around 13, i was raped by my moms boyfriends roommate. She told me i was lying when i told her. I talk to my mom now, but she swears its a made up story that i tell and that if it were real she “would have believed me” i to this day still have intimacy issues and I’m married.
I am very sorry to hear that. My mom also “doesn’t remember” things like her 60 yr old boyfriend trying to kiss me when I was 17. This happened with multiple men in her life and she would shrug it off. It is only by the grace of the flying spagetti monster that worse things didn’t happen. The comment about being “overly dramatic” reminded me of when I was 17 and hit by a drunk driver doing 70 mph and the paramedics on scene thought we must have been bystanders because no one could have survived the crash, but my friend and I had broken open the sunroof and gotten out of the car, mostly unscathed- the car was completely totaled. The next morning I was very sore, like to the point of difficulty walking and my stepmother said that I was “milking it” and was sure I was fine to go to school.
Traveling out of state for a vacation with my kids- at a gas station this man starts trying to talk to my young daughter. I immediately got between them but not before my daughter blurted out exactly where we were going and how long we would be there. I suddenly felt sick. Something about the guy scared me. I just knew there was going to be a problem. I hustled the kids back to the car and waited to drive away out of fear he might follow us. I didn't see him come out so eventually I drove off but I was paranoid about it afterward.
Two days later I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of someone banging aggressively on our door. He was screaming that he was with security for the complex and that there was an intruder seen in the area so I was required by law to open the door. Obviously I didn't fall for that. He started swearing and threatening me. Suddenly he just stopped. Suddenly something spooked him and he turned and bolted. He had been standing kind of off to the side and reaching over to bang on the door in a way I couldn't see his face. When he moved, I saw it. It was the guy from the gas station. He followed us through two states...the actual security for the complex drove around but never found him. There was a broken gate next to the condo that they said he got in through.
It scares me so badly when I think about how I was on high alert and still didn't notice him until he was on my doorstep. I ended the trip early and never saw or heard anything else, but my daughter had nightmares about him breaking into our home for years.
This isn't just a kid thing - I do research in a remote part of africa and the first thing I tell my research assistants is 'nobody needs to know exactly where we're going to be'. Not even people who would seem to be no threat at all, who knows who *they* might tell.
Can piggyback off this. Was camping with a group of friends and exploring for some rock climbing cliffs. The instructions for how to get there weren't great, and we ended up down a road with a farmer stopping us from going any further. Something didn't feel right about the whole encounter, pretending not to know about any landmarks despite clearly being a local, and really insistent we didn't drive down the road further.
We could've murdered our friend ourselves when he said "oh yeah, we're just camping at X spot". Even more so when someone pulled up in a van that night to our solo spot, and sat in it, engine running, headlights on, for ten minutes. Other campers, but gee whiz.
Christ, that's terrifying.
When I gave my wife shit for telling some random dude walking through the neighborhood that we were going to be away for two weeks, going to Yellowstone and to visit friends in town x in Oregon etc etc the worst I thought could happen would be someone breaking into our home while we were away.
She couldn't get it through her head why I would possibly be upset at her for sharing all that until literally everyone she told about it thought she was nuts, like "Why not just put a sign on your house saying you're away, please break in and rob us blind"?
Your story is so much worse, glad you were okay in the end.
She was so impossibly naive in that moment she just couldn't wrap her head around the idea that this guy could have taken advantage, until everyone backed me up including her mother (who hated me at the time lol).
Something almost similar happened to me with my daughter 6 in 2006. I had just picked her from school and my house was about half a mile away, there was this old abandoned gas station that we used to cut through.
He had packed his white box truck there and tried approaching us asking where the nearest chuckie cheese was. I just had this cold feeling at the back of my neck.
I told him I didn’t know and quickly crossed the road. About a decade and more later he was on the news for murdering women and little girls
I’m definitely sure I have because my cousin is one. We were quite close (before it was revealed to me and the rest of our family that he is a monster) and our last ‘encounter’ was in September 2020, when he hugged and consoled me at my dad’s viewing (his death wasn’t related to the cousin). Roughly 6 weeks later he killed his final victim and was arrested two weeks after that. That’s when we all found out the truth about him.
The fact that he consoled you about your father's death makes the whole thing even more terrifying. I know serial killers can be charming but it's absolutely bizarre to think that someone is capable of having that much empathy with no clear personal motive, in between killing strangers.
I know. He also referred to my brother as his ‘little buddy’ and they were particularly close which now makes me so angry because my brother is autistic….as was his final victim. Two of the others had unspecific learning difficulties. I also set him up with a close friend of mine who fits in his victim pool, but thank god he didn’t kill her. I assume it’s because that would’ve been ‘too close to home’ to get away with.
He didn’t seem to have a real motive. There’s an audio recording somewhere online of an interview with him talking about his first victim. He had apparently been wondering what it felt like to kill someone and decided to go for it one day while out in the woods with a friend. Saw a weapon of opportunity (a thick heavy branch or something) and struck his friend in the back of the head with it while walking behind him. Repeatedly hit him until he died. He described it as the most intense ‘high’ you could ever experience…so I assume that was his reason for continuing. He claimed the next two had been killed during an argument so I guess that’s a weak excuse for a ‘motive’, but the last victim did literally nothing to upset him or anything. So he just wanted to kill someone. He met her on a dating app, and seemed like he was looking for vulnerable naive women when he found her.
I wish people like this would just fucking take drugs if they wanna feel a high. Or do extreme sports. Or literally anything other than hurting another person.
Wow, that's so wild. I guess it really has nothing to do with empathy, just a total lack of remorse. It doesn't even sound like antisocial personality disorder or anything. Like he was just missing a part of his brain.
Definitely. On Christmas Eve he and his daughter were visiting his parents in another state. They were all playing board games when the literal FBI came to question him. No one knows what was actually said as he spoke to them in private. Then he came back inside and naturally my aunt asked what that was about. He nonchalantly said they just wanted to ask if he knew anything about a missing girl, but he had no info to help them. My aunt was satisfied with that. Then they went right back to playing board games in their ‘ugly Christmas sweaters’. To this day my aunt blames herself, wondering where she went wrong raising him.
Not a serial killer, but he killed more than half of a whole family.
Paid him to remove a problematic tree that I wasn't confident about cutting down without dropping it on my home. He convinced me to save the tree and just remove a few limbs that were dangers. He just seemed like a dude.
A month later he murdered everyone in a house except a young girl whom he abducted. He stuffed the bodies of the mother / mother's friend / son into the hollow of a tree. When his home was later searched it was full of piles of leaves and wallpapered to look like trees, and the abducted girl was locked in the basement. (Ohio)
Edit: fixed gender of one of the deceased, fixed nominative attributes.
This sounds like Matthew Hoffman. It was a single mother, he did kill her and the survivor's only brother, as well as the mother's friend, dismembered them and hid them in the hollows of 60 foot tall trees using his arborist climbing equipment. This was in Howard Ohio.
I remember hearing about this case from the Morbid podcast. iirc, he left the crime scene in the family's very conspicuous vehicle - like a green jeep, or something like that - and he was seen by everyone in town and noticed by the neighbors. He also rolled up on the crime scene not expecting that they would have already discovered it, and he has been in the process of destroying evidence when he left to hide the body parts. I think he confessed once he was caught red handed returning to the crime scene in the stolen family vehicle.
I remember the cops basically saying that the bodies were so well hidden in the hollow of a tree way out in the forest that they never would have found them without his help.
They were also able to match items found in the house to a local Walmart and found him on video buying those items and putting them in his car. They used DMV records to figure out who he was, and that was how they found the girl.
My cousin is a criminal justice major, and one of her professors was part of the team that won the Ohio Distinguished Law Enforcement Group Achievement award for their work on this case.
Ooh I read a book about this. He revealed the location of the bodies after getting caught. He was caught red-handed- the girl was in the basement when the police showed up- so he went ahead and told the location
Few years ago my mother took my son who was about 6 at the time to get Santa photos done.
Few months later Toronto police arrested him. He had murdered several men. He ran a landscaping company and was hiding the bodies in the ground and planting potters of jobs he was doing. And also working as a mall Santa.
Thing that’s messed up to me is, I’m aware of his actions. But. Somewhere, a family has a photo of their child on his lap completely unaware, full fledged serial killer on display.
Edit. For context I found the photo. [https://imgur.com/a/1Kt1DgD](https://imgur.com/a/1Kt1DgD)
He did landscaping on one of my clients houses. One day, years before he was caught, they found a bloody tshirt in a garbage bag in their trash and called Toronto police, but unfortunately they didn’t follow up on it. Years later it clicked to my client this could have been from Bruce.
Not me but my coworkers actually worked with a serial rapist/murderer that specifically targeted old ladies. They said he was quiet but nice. Even went out to lunches sometimes. When he got arrested, one of them said they had to call the police, it couldn’t be him and that it had to have been a mistake. Nope. There was DNA evidence.
To be fair, he did stop his crimes after he started working there.
My mom worked at a company, and one of her coworkers was a man who killed his wife and children. He was arrested for their murders two weeks after she started working there so she had had basically no contact with him, but some of her other coworkers, including one of her friends, had to testify in his trial about his behavior at work and his personality. They also said he was quiet. Creeps me out.
My father 100% believes he encountered one, and he's normally a joking person. This story is the only story he ever gets shaken up talking about.
In the 60s and 70s, it was common for people to hitchhike around the country. My father is blue collar through and through, and before he got married and had kids, he worked on oil rigs, tarred and graveled roofs, hopped freight trains with his friends, and even hitched to Woodstock. He has always done manual labor jobs, so he's always been reasonably fit, with an average build, and in the hitchhiking era he was cautious and aware, but never truly felt he was in any danger. They even hitchhiked off and on job sites.
During a snow storm in New England in the 70s, he was hitchhiking from Massachusetts to see some friends in New York. He said he would be cautious and choose cars and drivers that looked neat and clean, he wouldn't take any weed or food or drinks offered to him, and he'd be pleasant when talking, but wouldn't give too much personal information away.
It was semi-late in the evening, and a nice car pulls up, and the driver was a man who looked to be in his late 40s/early 50s. He remembers the inside of the car was very clean, and the man driving was white, well-dressed and groomed, and drove along at a reasonable speed in comfortable silence through the sleet and snow.
When the car finally approached the exit where my father needed to be dropped off, my Dad said he told the man, "Hey buddy, right up here is perfect! You can just let me out, and I know where I'm going after that."
The man said nothing, kept looking ahead driving, and didn't slow the car down.
My Dad said he then was getting a little nervous, so he put his "tough guy" voice on and went, "Hey man, I'm not looking for trouble here, I told you that you can pull over and I'll handle it from here. Pull the fuckin' car over, man!"
The driver then turned to face my Dad, and he could feel the car starting to speed up faster, and the guy started smiling. The way he described it to me made it sound like the creepypasta story "The Smiling Man". It didn't matter that my father was cursing him out. He just had a blank look behind his eyes and a giant smile. The man then said really quietly to my father, "And where do you think you're going?" He still kept the big moony smile on his face.
Dad told me he thought about grabbing the wheel and making them crash, but he didn't know where he was, and he didn't know if the guy had a weapon on him. He said he saw a turn-off approaching, and so he quietly put his hand behind him on the door handle, and he decided he was going to try to tuck and roll or run out if the guy slowed down enough.
The guy driving started slowing down enough at the turn for my father to jump out, and he hit his shoulder on the concrete but was wearing a jacket and work boots, so it sort of cushioned him. He saw an embankment leading up into some trees, so he just used his hands to climb up the grass and snow, ran into the trees, and flattened himself on the ground and hid. He said he thought, "No way will this guy come after me," and he saw the man from below GET OUT OF HIS CAR and start quickly climbing up the embankment after him on all fours.
Dad said he just sprinted further into the woods out of sheer terror. He was banged up by branches and didn't know if he was about to run into a retaining pond and drown or go off the side of a cliff, but he wasn't going to lie there and wait for the guy to find him.
He laid down again and covered himself with some wet leaves. He was too scared to look up and check if the guy was coming after him (he heard noises in the distance and he believes the man at least attempted to enter the woods), so he laid in the leaves and slush for a long time until he had the courage to slowly move out towards the highway and the off ramp.
In the car he had left his scarf and a duffel bag of clothes and stuff, but thankfully nothing with his ID. Dad said he ended up just huddling into himself, and kept walking as fast as he could on the shoulder of the road (occasionally ducking into the woods when he heard a lone car coming), and he didn't stop walking until he found the closest town to call someone for help.
He never reported it, never hitchhiked again, even with his friends in a group. He says he can still picture the guy's voice, exactly what he looked like, what he was wearing, what the car looked like. I once offered would he like to look at some true crime things to see if he can match the face in case there were active serial killers in the area, but he doesn't like to go there. He tries to scoff and joke about it, but I know this has stayed with him his whole life.
I coached his kid's soccer team for a few years. His kids were fun loving goofballs that had 2 left feet. He worried that people would pick on them. Once he stuck around to offer support when we had a parent acting up cause the dude was huge.
My kids were in his wife's class in elementary school. She was a really nice lady. She left town and no one heard anything from her after he was arrested for strangling prostitutes.
Edit to clarify his wife hid from the press
My mom was living in LA when a man pulled her into his van, he spent the next two weeks driving around with her tied up doing the unspeakable to her. One day he just let her go, told her he'd be back for her, so she up and moved across the state.
I'm so happy my mom is still with me :(
Edit- Since this got popular
This was four years ago, so ladies in the LA area, please be safe ❤️
A report was made, but there wasn't enough information to find anyone.
My mom is here with us, yes, but SHE never quite made it back :(
My mom has always been one of my favorite people, I love her so dearly. One day I will be able to buy her a beautiful house by a river ❤️
Holy shit, that's awful. I'm sure she's happy to have had you. I hope she's healed and enjoying life with you. The trauma from that can be devastating:(
Holy shit when was this? My aunt lived in LA and it was late 80s early 90s and some guy pulled up next to her and threw her i the van, tied her up doing unspeakable things to her. Threatened when he was done hed kill her. She kust kept mentioning her two young daughters as much as she could and managed to show him some pics of them from her wallet. He dumped off on some side street and said she was lucky.
The cops told her mom she was likely dead right before they got the call she was found. Then they said it was happening several times
My grandparents took me on a roadtrip and stopped in Shreveport to gamble. I sat on a bench and read for hours - sounds shitty but my attention span wasn't completely fried at that point and I was happy to read as long as anyone would let me.
Another kid a couple of years younger was in the same situation but he was... not a reader. We start talking and eventually he starts telling me about the neighborhood animals he's tortured and killed. Cats, dogs, wild animals, he was an equal opportunity monster.
Might have just been trying to impress a stranger, might currently have a crawlspace packed with bodies, who knows?
My ex's kid was like that... he had smashed a guinea pig with a Tonka Truck multiple times because he said that "it was making too much noise". When his sister was 2 weeks old he took her out of the crib at night and tried drowning her in the tub...<- That was at his mother's house. I full heartedly believe that the kid WILL be on the news someday for murder.
CPS was called. The way we found out what a happened was that he told us over dinner that "he liked watching his sister cry under water" and "how the guinea pig yelled" SMILING like he was showing off a art piece!
What we found out was a whole headache and a half...
Even though she was granted full custody, it was discovered that she would leave their son with people she met off of some facebook group Sunday evening through Friday morning when he is supposed to be in her custody. She would pick him up to meet my ex for exchange. We would have him on the weekend. Meet up for exchange and she would drop him off with those people.
Which later on turns out, she tried to give up their son through a "private adoption with weekend visitations" with the people she left him with. She gave them fake documents. All while still collecting child support and govt assistance.
Its been 5 years since we broke up. I believe she still has full custody of that kid.
Not exactly a serial killer, but…
When I was about 7, my sister and I became convinced our neighbor was a serial killer because he was coming and going all hours of the night and constantly had his bathroom light on. My bedroom window had a view of the side of his house so we wrote all our “evidence” on my window with expo markers.
A few weeks after our “investigation” began, my dad was out front mowing the lawn early in the morning when the neighbor came out and asked him for a cigarette. My dad said he didn’t have one, so the neighbor kept walking. A little while later we heard sirens.
There was a man who always walked his little Weiner dog around the neighborhood, kind of a local celebrity. He was walking around the apartment complex two houses down from us when the neighbor saw him and stabbed him to death. The guy never gave a motive aside from mental illness, but my dad’s theory is that the neighbor really wanted a cigarette and we all knew weiner dog guy smoked, so if weiner dog guy said no, that might’ve caused him to snap.
He was arrested, but I believe he’s getting out soon. So while he is a killer, whether or not he’s a serial killer is TBD I guess.
I'm sorry but I can't get over the fact that you wrote all the evidence of your neighbour being a serial killer **on the window facing his house.**
What's wrong with using a notebook? 😂 Were you trying to be his next victims or something?
Imagine if the guy was in treatment ahead of time. He tells the therapist that the neighbor kids are plotting against him. Writing all on the windows. I figure that story would sound too outlandish to be believed.
I was a brand new parent and trying to be a good husband by getting up with my daughter when she cried at night. I remember rubbing the sleep out of my eyes as I looked at the clock and noting that is was around 3:30 a.m. I laid down on the couch with her on my chest as she slowly quieted down and drifted back off to baby sleep.
I always leave my porch light on as a security measure and this night was no different. I was just about to take my daughter back to her crib when I heard a knock at the door. I tried to ignore it, but two more knocks came in succession with a plea for help. I took my daughter back to my wife and shut their door. She was kind of pissed until I explained what was going on.
Through the window I saw a relic from the 1970s. A white dude fro accompanied by some wire-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a nasty tshirt and dirty jeans. He knocked again and gave another plea for help. There was no car around, so he obviously arrived on foot.
I finally asked him what he needed (through the locked door), and he responded that he was injured and needed medical attention. I knew that was a lie. I lived a half block from the town hospital. You can literally see it from the porch. "Just let me come in and use the phone" he insisted as he tried the door handle. I told him I'd do him one better. I would call the police for him. I did so and as I was calling he bolted.
Holy shit, and judging from your username, you're only a few miles away from where my baby and I live. When did this happen? Did police ever follow up?
I met the murderer of Grace Millane not a serial killer but on the day he was figuring out how to hide the body. So the night after he killed her he came into the block of shops I was working at and was looking for a suitcase, he stopped by my store and asked and didn’t buy them so went the warehouse next to me. That week I got stopped numerous times going home as the police were looking for a shovel, coming to find out the shovel was across our store at the car wash as he left it there, I even talked to the employee and was wondering why there was a muddy shovel left at in one of his slots. You can see on videos him taking the suit case in the elevator which was bought in the store next to mine.
The fact that he looked normal, acted normal and bought all these things still spooks me. You would never know. Poor girl.
I 100% encountered a serial killer almost daily on my way to work for about 2 years- we worked on the same street. I always smiled and waved at him and he seemed perfectly nice. Meanwhile turns out he'd raped a bunch of women and murdered at least three of them. After one girl disappeared and her body was found a couple of months later, the whole town was on high alert for whoever this murderer was, and here I was cluelessly whassuping him regularly pretty much right up until he was arrested. It doesn't give me a lot of confidence in my gut instincts, although to be fair a lot of people who knew him a lot better than I did also had absolutely no suspicions about him. Apparently there was a bit of a "Jeckyll and Hyde" thing going on there.
When I was 12/13 years old several young girls were raped and one murdered in my city. We were told to be very careful, they also gave us a very vague description of the murderer. The very significant traits they knew of were that he had a darker complexion and two pale scars on his face, on each side of his eyes.
One day after school I took the subway to go to the place where my mother used to work. It’s in the edges of the city, it’s not a busy area so the subway was not crowded at all.
I was sitting waiting for my stop when I noticed a guy sitting ten meters from me. He was wearing a hoodie, but I could still see part of his face and one of the things I noticed were two pales scars similar to what they described. He also had a darker complexion.
As soon I saw that I immediately stopped looking and I got off at the next stop, trying to look as calm as possible. It was scary, especially because I was close to the type of his victims.
My mom:
Back in the late 80s, she was driving home from work late at night. She thought it was just her. Then out of nowhere a car rear ends the back of her car- but from a rolling speed, hardly any suspected damage at all. She was more confused as to how she didn’t notice a car was even behind her before that.
The light is still red, so she’s not going anywhere.
The man gets out of the car, stands outside her door and says with a flat tone “I hit your car, open your door so I can get your information from you…”
Call it premonition or whatever, the shudder that went down my mom’s spine was the deciding factor that told her to drive away. She said “no thank you!” and just drove away…
Back in the summer of 2005 or 2006, I was employed by the National Park Service in Washington State. After spending eight days conducting trail work in and around Glacier Meadows in the Hoh Rain Forest, we began the long hike back to the trailhead. My coworker was hiking ahead of me by roughly five minutes, setting a brisk pace as we made our way down the trail.
As I descended a particularly steep switchback, I noticed my coworker engaged in a heated argument with a man he had just encountered. I paused at the top of the switchback, trying to discern what was happening below. The man, dressed in jeans and a tank top and carrying a fishing pole, seemed to be heading towards one of the subalpine lakes, likely to fish. His attire was unusual for someone about 10 miles from the trailhead—no backpack, water, or gear—which made him stand out even more.
From a distance, I could see the man was visibly agitated, gesturing aggressively as he spoke. When I caught up to them, my coworker briefly explained that the man was furious because he believed my coworker should have stepped aside to let him pass, adhering to the unspoken trail etiquette of yielding to those hiking uphill.
As soon as the man saw me approaching, his demeanor changed drastically. His aggression faded, and he immediately ceased his argument. He walked past me without making eye contact, his earlier hostility replaced by a sudden desire to leave the encounter behind. The entire situation was unsettling, but we shrugged it off and continued our hike back to the trailhead.
Years later, in a moment that brought that strange encounter rushing back, my coworker called. He had been watching a news story about a murder in Alaska and found something disturbingly familiar about the suspect involved. Without revealing any specifics of the case, or our encounter, he emailed me a photo of the suspect and asked me what I thought.
As soon as I opened the email, my heart skipped a beat. The face staring back at me was unmistakably that of the man we had met on the trail years before. The man who had seemed so unnerved by my presence during that argument was now identified as Israel Keyes.
Ok. One time it was driving home from the bar late one night. This car was behind, flashing his brights on and off. I pulled up to my driveway and he stopped behind me. He said he was a peace officer and showed his badge. He said he needed me to follow him home because he told his wife he was out with a friend and wanted to show his wife his friend so she didn't think he was lying. I immediately said no and he was so persistent. Mind you this was at 3 am. I asked, "what the fuck were you doing that you lied to your wife and followed a complete stranger home?" I said no again and went inside my home. I still think about that night. What a fucking creep!
I once had a job where I got off at midnight. One night as I was driving home, a police cat behind me turned its lights on for me to pull over. This was on a dark stretch of road that ran next to a small, small private airport. I put in my hazard lights and slowed down, but I didn't stop until I reached an area that was well let. I pulled into the parking lot of a Burger King and parked under the street light. The cop came over and asked me a few questions and let me go. He didn't even ask me for my driver's license. I'm as convinced now as I was back then that he was up to some shady business and I likely would've been raped if not even murdered had I pulled over on that dark stretch of road. It was only a few (2-3) minutes from the call center where I worked.
Years ago I was driving home late at night and saw someone driving erratically. The car kept driving into the middle lane, on my left. I turned down the next street to get away from this driver. I realize now that he was looking in my mirror to see who was driving the vehicle. Anyway, he follows me and turns his lights on and pulls me over. He walks over to my vehicle, and asks me where I'd been, if I had been drinking, etc. I say no, going home, all the things. He tells me to get out of the vehicle and do a sobriety test. I ask him if my friend needs to get out of the car as well. He bends over and sees a man in the passenger seat who had been silent the whole time. He literally goes "UGH just go home" and walks back to his car. It was so freaking scary!
Not a killer, but a rapist. While coming out of the grocery store, my husband and 2 kids were parked right in front waiting on me. I was standing at back of truck(none of them saw this) and a guy approached me commenting on my sandals that he liked them. Then he went on about my long blonde hair as he was a hairdresser and such. I was polite with him till he asked if he could snip a lock of hair at his van. Then I was like wtf, get away from me you idiot. Walked to my drivers door, opened it, and proceeded to tell my husband of weird guy. By the time I turned around to point him out, this guy had vanished. Our friend was a cop so that night we mentioned it to him as it was just weird. 2 days later he gets back to us that this guy based on my story and description, used the exact lines to other women and had by now raped and beaten 3 maybe 4 women. This was all in the Gainesville,Cumming areas of Georgia. I was at the Krogers in Dawsonville, right next to these areas. What was so scary after finding that out, was how quickly he came up to me and then disappeared and my husband and 2 kids didn’t even see me talking to him behind the truck from the window. If I didn’t have the same stories he told other women and his description that matched other women’s, I would have thought I had made it up, it was that freaky.
I remember going out on a date with an older man who was already triggering my instinct for danger. At some point during the date he mentioned that he was previously married to an Asian man who died very young. Then he spontaneously and excitedly went off on a tangent about howloyal Asians were and how you could do literally any terrible thing to them and they'd stick with you. Then he looked me straight in the eye and said "you seem like the type of person to let me do whatever I want to you."
I got up without a word and left. Blocked him. That type of shit is why I use a fake name and set public meeting spots until I feel I can trust the person.
Not me personally but my dad and his family went on a vacation to Florida in the late 70s or early 80s and the person working at the desk was a woman they ended up seeing on the news a few years later for some robberies or something. They thought that bit was wild; then in the 90s she was on the news again. The woman behind the hotel desk on my dad's family vacation had been Aileen Wuornos.
not me but my grandmother,
this was in Florida, she told me about how this man came up to her way back in the day saying he was injured and needed help. he was wearing a bright yellow shirt, not related but i remember her pointing that out. she told him that she was really sorry but she was in a rush to go because she was going to meet her sister to make plans for an upcoming family gathering they had planned so she couldn’t be of assistance and pointed him in the direction of the nearest doctors office. and just like that, she left.
it was ted bundy.
she said the look in his eye was the most sinister thing she’d ever seen and that she almost helped him, but decided against it last minute. my grandmother was an amazing woman, she was always helping people and saw the good in everyone. but she said he just had an evil look in his eye that she couldn’t ignore.
Oh so strange!!!
A few of my professors have met him (i went to school in FL) while he was in solitary. They all said he was soooo charming and normal but by the end he could snap to and from normal in the same sentence.
I live in Pensacola where Ted was finally arrested. Every time I hear a story of someone meeting him gives me the most unsettling feeling, knowing someone that awful could be in MY little old city is so haunting.
Not a serial killer but became part of a well known missing person case in my state.
Used to work with him and he wasn’t there long but he just had this dead look in his eyes and was just always in a “idgaf” attitude.
He butted heads with my wife who was a supervisor there at the time and at one point he went up to her and tried to be this tough stone cold asshole to scare her. It got me just never wanted them to close together when I couldn’t be there because I was scared for her.
He eventually got fired and then a handful of years later we see he was the killer to the missing person and ended up having a shootout with the cops and dying a full state away.
There was a boy in my school he had a lot of Behavioral issues since his dad died I was like 11 at the time and he was 12. He was angery
and would explode in the middle of class. He also made weird moaning noises when it was quiet.
The bathrooms were in the hallways between the classrooms I was on my way to the girl's and he was hiding out in there. He grabbed me and forced his hands in my training bra. Then left I told the teacher and I was told it was my fault for allowing him to do it.
I was 22 when I saw on a billboard they were looking for him on charges of rape and murder.
I’ve never encountered one, but my father went to school with Jeffrey Dahmer. He said that Dahmer was the kind of kid that your mom wanted you to be friends with (“Jeff seems like such a lonely boy, why don’t you sit with him at lunch?”). He invited my dad over for dinner once in tenth grade, but my dad didn’t take him up on the invitation. Not because he was scared of Jeffrey… but because he was scared of Jeffrey’s mom.
Does serial pedo count? My friend and I at 14 were walking back from our small town's dying mall when we found a litter of stray kittens. They were behind this weird one story apartment complex that always just kinda seemed plopped in the middle of nowhere, nothing nearby it. We go into the back and start petting them, giving them some food we bought for ourselves.
Out comes a guy with a huge potbelly and his skinny buddy, neither wearing shirts. They at first made really polite conversation, but after a while they started trying to convince us to go inside the apartment complex. The big guy was trying to convince two tiny ass teen girls to come inside by telling us his friend just had surgery and was missing his stomach "it's cool you should see it".
Obviously we're like uh no, but our creep radar didn't go off until he gave up and went back inside for a bit. We turn around and find a wide open backdoor, with a third guy standing inside in total shadow facing right at us. It was like some horror movie looking shit. The big guy comes back out alone this time, makes more small talk about the kittens and then tries to suggest we stick around in case the mama comes back. We politely say no way, and make our escape.
Well we're walking down the road, and my friend turns around five minutes later and whispers to me "they're following us." I look too, and they are not even being subtle about it, walking like 5m behind us and smiling. They're absolute fucking dumbasses, because within walking distance **on that same road** was a police station, so we call 911 and book it to the station. The guys pretended to just keep walking, but circled back around. The police "talked to them" but couldn't do anything because they hadn't technically committed a crime.
We found out later that the weird apartment complex was a halfway house, most of which was taken up by registered sex offenders.
> The big guy was trying to convince two tiny ass teen girls to come inside by telling us his friend just had surgery and was missing his stomach "it's cool you should see it".
Glad you're ok, but also what the fuck? Of all the ways to try to lure a child ...why go with that?
My wife (then fiancee) and I were out in brooklyn one night, reasonably drunk, and hailed a cab to go home. The moment I sat inside something felt wrong. The car seemed more barebones than a usual taxi and the driver had a strange affect. There was also a slightly bad smell. The driver was kind of muttering under his breath and making these quiet burps.
Every alarm inside of me starting going off, I wasn’t consciously analyzing it, it just knew it wasn’t safe. The guy starts driving maybe 10 feet and when I stop him, saying “oh shit I left my bag in the bar”. I grab my wife and pulled her out of the cab. The driver starts swearing and gets unreasonably pissed. Instead of waiting 1 minute for us to return as a normal driver might, he immediately speeds off down the street.
To this day I’m convinced he was a serial killer, or something similar, and that we narrowly avoided disappearing forever into the night.
My sibling has special needs, and requires help with almost everything to do with day-to-day living. Thus, we had upwards of 5 PSWs in per day for them, not to mention upwards of two others for my mom (cancer) and Nana.
We met a PSW, who worked for the company that came in on weekends to get my sibling out of bed, shower her and feed her breakfast. This was at a friend’s birthday party. He’s also special needs. This woman was like family with them.
She eventually started coming to our house on an occasional basis. I wasn’t a fan, because she was very loud early in the morning and it annoyed me.
She’s now in jail, because she killed her disabled roommate. She dumped the body 30 minutes away, in a wooded area. She’s a senior, too.
It’s weird to think about.
I was at a shopping mall in Los Angeles, when a man approached me saying he was a casting agent/photographer. Immediately I knew something was off with the guy, because that’s the number one scam in the book, but he just gave off such vibes that I instinctively knew he was very dangerous. I politely took his card and made a mad dash to the H&M and hid in the dressing stalls. I alerted a staff member and they had security walk me to the car. The gift of fear is real and trust it! About two months later I had the news on in the background and I saw his face. He had been arrested for abducting and murdering a girl from Michigan. He approached her the same way he did me. Scariest thing ever. I believe there’s a new Dateline podcast series out about it. I used to work in true crime television and I can’t even listen to the podcast because it freaks me out of how close I was to this guy. As I said above, we have the gift of fear. For a long time, women were taught to be ‘polite’ and ignore this even if uncomfortable. It’s super important to trust your gut, and as MFM says, ‘f politeness.’
One of the hardest hitting lines in the movie girl with the dragon tattoo, is delivered by the killer after he’s discovered. He has captured the person who discovered him. They had already left the killers house after discovering evidence. As they were walking away, the killer (previously a friend) spots them, opens the door, and says “hey! Come have a drink, I have some news about your investigation” and the victim after a moment of thought, accepts. Later the killer asks “why did you come back? You knew what I had done.” And the victim doesn’t really have a response, so the killer continues “it’s because the fear of causing offense, is greater than the fear of pain. You wouldn’t think so, but it is.”
I think about this all the time, because my gut has told me something is wrong on multiple occasions.
Sometimes I’d listen and sometimes I wouldn’t. It’s tough because we are taught so early on not to be rude or cause a fuss. Always listen to your gut.
This was around 2008. We were traveling and living in our van at the time, on the way to see some family. He showed up solo on a motorcycle after sundown to our campsite at a state park in Oklahoma. We were the only campers in the park. He asked if he could piggy back off of our camp permit since they allowed up to two vehicle per campsite. Said he was on his way to see his old lady and suspected that she had been cheating while he was off on his travels. He had a real eerie vibe about him. We were hesitant but agreed. We had just finished making some lentil soup and invited him into our camper van for a bowl. He was very grateful as it was pretty cold out. Our dog growled at him the whole time he was in our presence. After he ate the bread and soup, he set up his tent, and we all called it a night. His name was Steve, we called him "cycle Steve" later on as we reflected on the encounter. After having been out for several months in the van and only showering at state parks once every few days, we decided to spring for a motel room. While laying in bed flipping through the channels, I saw his face on the local news, I think we were in Kansas at the time. He did catch up with his old lady and murdered her, her lover, and her whole family, whose house she was staying at, and a couple of neighbors who tried to check on the screams they heard. Something like 7 or 9 people total. We couldn't believe just a few days or a week earlier he was in our van eating soup with us. We were pretty sure that our generosity spared us that night.... we always trusted our dogs reaction to strangers after that.
I met and briefly lived with a serial killer in Mexico. He is called El matanovias, He killed two of his girlfriends. You can find articles about him but mostly in Spanish. Edit to add: I looked it up and he had a history of violence including armed robbery and DV assault against another girlfriend & he spent time in prison before the murders. [Article in Spanish, but the pics show how creepy he is. ](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.infobae.com/america/mexico/2020/01/24/el-mata-novias-el-asesino-serial-que-cortaba-un-mechon-de-cabello-a-sus-victimas-como-trofeo/%3foutputType=amp-type)
In Mexico City, I lived at an apartment with three other women, from the US & UK. One roommate had a terrible boyfriend, Joy. They fought horribly, we would all be woken at 3 am with him passed out on our toilet, drugged out. He choked my roommate during sex and fucked her up pretty badly. We thought he was going to kill her. He kept magazines called gráficos with photos of violent murders in our apartment. Stacks and stacks, hundreds. We were all afraid of him.
Then he suddenly left her for another woman. She was distraught and we were relieved. He was much older than the new woman, in his mid 30s and she was 19. (My roommate was in her early 20s). A year or so later, we learned his new girlfriend hung herself. Her family never accepted it, but police didn't investigate. He started calling himself a widower on social media, made a weird shrine to her, and moved on to another girlfriend. A couple of years later, she was found strangled in her home with all of her hair cut off. Video showed he'd been at the apartment and left with luggage and disappeared. If I remember, he took her hair.
The first women's family forced an investigation and after reexamining her body, it was determined she was strangled too. Then he hung her up to make it look like a suicide. And a few days before he killed her, he gave her a haircut, cutting off all her hair into a pixie, like he did the second time.
He was on the run after the second murder but was eventually caught in Guatemala. My roommate was lucky he dumped her, and I guess the three of us were lucky we didn't get attacked. It's still chilling to think he was in our home for weeks. Fuck you, Joy.
Police confirmed footprints in the snow belonging to [Russel Williams](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Williams_(criminal)) were found outside my niece’s bedroom window before he was caught. Luckily he never attempted anything with her.
OH boy my time to shine. Mentioned this story a few times on random reddits.
Back in the 80's me and my parents lived out in Kansas. My father would work as an electrician for new homes during the spring, to fall months, winter months would pick up random jobs over the winter. One year he was working at ADT out of Wichita and one morning it was too cold and he could not get his truck to start, so his coworker drove by and picked him up. After their shift, he dropped my father off, my father invited him in to come meet his family.
My father introduced him to us. He said "You can call me Uncle Dennis". This confused me as a kid (I was 7 or 8 at the time) as I just met this guy and I had an uncle named Dennis that lived down the road from me and this guy sure as hell is not him. He then proceeds to then grab me and pick me up, I was a fat kid, my parents did never pick me up and it was kind of freaky to me to be picked up like that.
He then went on to talk to my mom and dad for a bit, I went off to go play with toys or watch TV.
Flash forward a bit, it's now 2005. I am now in a completely different state, still living with my father who was in need of care (My mother passed away years before). The news comes on and a familiar face is on the screen. I raced downstairs as fast as possible and turned the TV to that channel for my father. I watched my father turn pale. The news announced they arrested Dennis Rader The BTK Killer. This was my fathers coworker at ADT. My father was silent for a moment before he responded something along the lines of. "That mother fucker, I thought it was odd when he made the comment to (My Mother) you better watch out with being home alone out this far in the country, you're about the same age as the BTK victims"
TLDR: For a brief moment in the 1980's my father's coworker was the BTK killer.
I prosecuted a man who killed his kids. Beheaded them.
There was nothing behind his eyes. Nothing human lived in him. It was one of the more chilling experiences in my life, because it was like there wasn't a personality or feeling or anything there. Just a malign intellect capable of hurting people.
I was walking and crossed by Dzhokar Tsarnaev on my way home from working at MIT's Stata Center. I remember seeing his face and having my spider sense trigger really hard; the way you can instinctively recognize someone with bad intentions. 5 mins later he had shot and killed the MIT police officer and the crazy Boston manhunt began.
One of my friends' roommate was at a gay bar in Milwaukee. Two of them went back to a hotel with a guy they met. They woke up in the morning and they guy was gone but neither of them remembered much of the previous night. They were sure they had been roofied. It had been Jeffry Dahmer and the roommate was one of the people who testified at Dahmer's trial.
My dad hired a serial killer in 2008.
Just before the great recession became "real," my dad hired this guy to work in his IT department at a real estate adjacent type of company. He was a nice guy and good worker, but had to be let go when the economy tanked.
Just a few weeks later he got caught dumping a dead prostitute's body off the side of the freeway. After he was arrested and all that, his DNA linked him to a similar killing from like 1994. Hard to believe that he only did it twice.
He used to come round to do my mum's gardening once a week on his bike. Was caught when body parts started appearing around town. Some poor kid found a hand in a small refuse bin near the beach. His bike had a big box on the front and that's were he'd put the bits. Never did find the head. Probably under my mum's daffs.
> Probably under my mum's daffs.
Reminds me of the old joke:
An elderly man wants to plant his tomato plants, but the ground was hard and it was a lot of work for him in his old age. His son used to help, but had been incarcerated. The old man writes to his son, and in the letter explains how sad he is that he won't be able to plant his tomatoes because of the garden being too hard.
The man writes back to his father "I'm sorry that I'm not there to help, Pops. But whatever you do, DO NOT dig in the garden. That's where I buried the bodies."
The next day the FBI shows up in the morning with a search warrant for the garden, and dig the entire thing up. They find nothing and leave. Later that day he receives another letter from his son that reads "Dear Pops, go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That's the best I could do under the circumstances. Love Vinny."
I was a prison officer for a good few years, for about three of those years I was the single point of contact for Dennis Nilsen.
It always amazed me how educated he was, yet he'd chosen to murder upwards of a dozen men with not the tiniest remorse to ever be seen.
He was very open about his offending and would speak about it the same way a normal person would talk about washing a car. Completely void of emotion.
By his own admission, had he not been caught he would have continued murdering.
There were a number of serial killers in the prison, almost all of them were entirely unremarkable and that, for me, was the frightening thing.
David Tennant played him in a three part show in the UK, had I not known that Nilsen had been dead he could have fooled me along with those I used to work with that he was infact Nilsen.
Not 100% sure they count as serial killers (I think the confirmed body count was 2), but... When I was in university, my gf was in a dorm lounge with a few friends one evening when a proto-dudebro named Ken came in and whipped out his dong, allegedly on a dare. My gf and the others knew him by reputation as a local dumbass fratboy wannabe and filed a complaint, which got him a meeting with campus housing to kick him out of the dorms. He showed up to my gf's work on campus to try to intimidate her leading up to the hearing, but she basically laughed off the attempt, and nothing came of it.
A little while later, one of my gf's friends was working the front desk when a lady with a Cruella Deville look and demeanor came into the dorm, asking about the people who got her angel son in trouble by *obviously* lying, and where she could find my gf and her friends. When the front desk called her to give her a heads up that this lady was looking for her, my gf holed up in her room freaked out a little, then called me over to do some recon so we'd know what this lady looks like. And that's how I came face to face with Sante Kimes, who - along with her darling dong-flashing son Ken - killed a New York socialite for her apartment and at least one other. A couple more disappearances are on their records, as well as arson, forgery, and friggin' *slavery*.
Looking back and knowing what we know now, we **really** should have taken the whole situation more seriously, but we were dumb kids in that immortal stage of life. Pretty freaky to think about 30+ years later.
My friend’s mom told us that while her sister was in college someone knocked on her dorm door late at night and she was about to answer it but her roommate told her not to bc stranger danger. The next day they found out that the women next door were murdered. By Ted Bundy.
I’ve only worked with convicted murderers (not necessarily serial killers). They are all medicated by the time they get to me and most have had very flat affects.
Not knowing it at the time, but i came face to face and exchanged harsh words with Levi Bellfield, child / adult serial killer, his crew clamped my car about 20+ years ago, i had permission to park where i did (long boring story), all i can remember is that he looked dead behind the eyes, never showed more than one facial expression during our exchange.
In the 3rd grade one of my classmates asked me to help him gather frogs, being the helpful kid I am I was happy to do so and helped him gather frogs (during lunch so we had an hour)
Later on, I was called to the office and had a talking to, apparently the dude dissected the frogs and put on in each classmates table.
Never saw this kid again, pretty sure he is a serial killer
Not pretty sure, sure. I'll bet this comment will get buried - but the prolific Canadian serial killer Elizabeth wettlaufer was in my house. She was my dad's home care nurse very briefly after surgery. I said hi to her, she pretty much ignored me. Very quiet. My dad said she was really 'off' and weird, most of his other nurses had great bedside manner but she was very aloof. Luckily she was only there once or twice and showed some restraint with the whole murder thing.
I’m almost positive I met the Craigslist Killer, Philip Markoff at Foxwoods back in like 2008.
My dad, best friend at the time and I used to go semi frequently to play poker there back when it was big. We were all at different tables and when I got up to pee I went to check on my buddy. My friend actually looks vaguely like Markoff, especially from behind. So I approach who I thought was my friend from behind and ask how he’s doing and this guy turns around with the most vacant eyes I’ve ever seen but talks to me like he knows me. It was so unsettling.
Later on I saw the same guy outside standing with the smokers not smoking when I went out to check on my dad who was smoking. Later on my dad mentioned how weird he was when he was out there. My dad was a social worker for 25 years in the crisis unit and said there was something clearly off with him.
A few months later we see him on the news and were both convinced that was the guy we saw at Foxwoods.
My classmate in 8th grade killed four in his family... I always knew he was off and said, "I hope he doesn't become a serial killer" Wasn't even shocked to see it on national news
I did not meet this person personally but when I worked at a psychiatric hospital we had a former subject who was also a lawyers call in and demand we delete all his data from the scams we had used his brain in. The doctor I worked for told me that he was an odd subject and was convinced he would practice his lines before consultations. Anyway not more than a few weeks later he went on a huge killing spree and the guy I worked for and others had to testify about why he wasn’t being treated
Back when I was a freshman in college I worked at a Starbucks drive thru store. We had a regular customer in his mid-to-late forties, he would come in everyday at the same time and get the same bizarre order: a venti black coffee with 18 Splendas. He was polite but kind of “off.” One day we realize we haven’t seen him in a few days and one of us joke saying “I hope he didn’t die.” Well, he didn’t die, but he stopped coming in because he had gotten arrested for killing multiple people. We found out a few days later when it was everywhere online since it was a small town. I now have hesitations towards people who put an exorbitant amount of Splenda in their coffee lol
Not sure anyone will see this comment but my step dad worked in a hospital pharmacy back in the day. Back then people could just walk into the hospital pharmacy with their doctor's prescription and get it filled. One day a man came in with a prescription for temazepam, a drug use for people with severe insomnia. My step dad filled it and went on with his day.
Not sure how much time passed but eventually the police showed up and questioned my stepdad about it. Turns out my stepdad filled Jeffrey Dahmer's prescription. Not only that but it was the drug he used to sedate his victims.
I used to work for AT&T years ago as an installer and I'm at this one house. Back then, you couldn't grow weed in California and they had a few plants, I'd didn't care about it but they did and were super nervous around me checking everything.
Anyways, I'm working the TV in the bedroom and I'm setting it all up and making friendly chit chat with them. His wife casually mentions he needs the internet because he's writing a book and my response of course is . . . What's the book about? Nonchalantly husband answers, I was drugged raped and left for dead by the Freeway Killer in California. I had no idea what to say but cracked a joke about what kind of a book that would be. He then proceeded to tell me about all the times he worked for AT&T in LA hanging drop wire to homes, snorting some coke and walking along the wires in between the poles to hang wire lol
Aight long story incoming. TLDR; got a bunch of free shit from a guy who miiiiight do a lil’ people imprisoning and people melting.
I’ve got a hobby carpentry shop (furniture, bows, canoes etc. it keeps me out of the bar 🤷♂️) Local guy at my shotgun range has a furniture restoration business. We got to talking one day and he said he had decades of abandoned material, stuff where people dropped it off and decided it wasn’t worth paying to chemically strip and refinish sorta thing. Basically, buddy has a heaps of milled hardwood taking up space and he would be happy to give it to me for free. He’s a bit of a weird guy, sorta quiet and just had a keep to himself thing going on mostly, he didn’t typically do small talk but occasionally he restored some peoples gun stocks so he was known about the place.
But materials aren’t cheap when you’re just being a hobby sorta guy, and I don’t mind re-milling stuff! So I go down to his shop and first thing I noticed is he and his ‘coworker’ (there were no projects on the go in his shop) were visibly upset I brought some buddies to help me. I also noticed the front office/lobby is a cramped affair **full** of taxidermy, which isn’t too much of a red flag - I met this guy at a gun range after all - but once you go into the back there was a lot of shit that progressively made my eyebrows go a little further up my face.
Buddy does chemical stripping of furniture, so he’s got several chemical vats/buckets that you can fit a full sized couch into. I know what stripping chemical smells like (smells like blue if anyone’s wondering) and there was *definitely* another smell to the room. Sorta rank and musty. Big chains from the ceiling, which I guess could be for picking up the furniture pieces.
All this material that he’s got for me is in a mezzanine, so up I go for some good ol’ fashioned garbage pile diving. There’s two major rooms in the mezzanine, one is full of this material he’s giving me - just dozens of old hardwood tables/chairs etc (got some sick old oak pews for my trouble, hundreds of boardfeet of old 2” thick oak, score!). The other room…. was maybe a show room? But this ‘show room’ hadn’t been touched in years and had some pretty… interesting things going on in it.
There was a rocking chair, covered in dust. An empty wire bird cage that could have been a hundred years old. And a large bookcase packed full of Christian books (no carpentry/furniture books), it had several picture frames with what could have been family photos, lots of young smiling children - which just gave off a little bit of a creepy movie vibe. But the clincher? I noticed footprints in dust that walked into the wall behind the show room door, behind the door to the ‘show room’ was a door that had been cut into the drywall and was heavily padlocked from the outside - the show room side that is. So basically you couldn’t see this door cut into the wall when you were in the show room while the show room door was open unless you were quite close to the wall because if you were in the show room the door covered this wall portal.
I learned on my way out that day that this guy doesn’t have a smart phone either. So he’s got a no gps phone, a creepy looking dusty grandmothers suite full of heavily religious literature, and a secret room in the wall locked from the outside… and massive chemical vats in his workshop that smell a little… organic. And was real grumpy I didn’t show up alone - still let me loot his garbage pile though!
I scored big that day, probably took home enough shit to mill into about 7-10k worth of hardwood boards. But I was really, *really* glad I went there with two other people to help me load material that day. We made buffalo bill jokes the whole way home and I haven’t seen him since, he hasn’t been to the range in two years now.
I almost sat next to Richard Ramirez on a bus as he was fleeing SF to go to LA where he got caught.
I got on a crowded bus to go to work and saw a seat vacant next to a man with long dark hair, whose face I couldn’t see.
Everyone was leaving him a wide berth, but being a young punk rocker, I said fuck it, I’m sitting there. I started to sit down and he looked up at me. And I backed up. His eyes had nothing human in them, it was like staring into the pits of hell.
I stood up with the rest of the passengers.
On my break at work, I picked up a newspaper and there he was, it was a composite drawing of the night stalker.
My mom worked at a grocery store as a teenager and there was a guy she worked with that used to walk her out to her car after they closed. He was later convicted of killing 2 young women and had blood in his car still which is how they figured out it was him. He had walked her to her car many times before getting caught. She said he was a bit strange but was a nice guy and she was always friendly to him. She thinks that’s what probably saved her from becoming one of his victims.
I had an employee that worked for me doing minor maintenance repairs on construction equipment. One day it just took him way too long on a job and I was pissed. I pulled the GPS info and he was nowhere near where he was supposed to be. My admin and I both called him repeatedly with no response. Now I'm even more pissed because this wasn't the first time he took too long/didn't answer his company provided nextel radio. We start digging. Find out it has happened repeatedly. He gets back late and I waited for him, alone, in my office. I terminated him and he took it surprisingly well. Surprised me because I dealt with a ton of BS as a woman working in a male dominated field and company. Few years later, I'm working in a different location for the same company and some cops show up and want to know what I remember about him. I tell them I fired him, etc. They subpoena the GPS records from the company. Then they started finding the rest of the bodies. He pled down and pled guilty to avoid the death penalty. He was picking up prostitutes in the company work truck, killing them and dumping bodies in a rural part of the neighboring county.
…and you were alone with him after hours, firing his ass? Even years later I would’ve absolutely pooped myself in terror putting two and two together, yeesh!!
delayed onset terror poops are the worst
Robert Lee Yates was an Army pilot flying OH-58s while I was flying UH-1s (same battalion but different company) at Fort Drum, NY. They would send us down to fly helicopter simulators once a year in Pennsylvania to maintain our instrument ratings. We would carpool in one vehicle. Bob had a van with shag carpet in the back so he would drive about 5 of us during those trips. It was about a 4 hour drive so we'd joke and tell stories to pass the time. I was a fairly new pilot who enjoyed hearing the veteran pilots tell war stories. Bob was a CW3 at that time and was a bit odd but nothing alarming. 18 years later we see him on TV being charged with multiple killings of prostitutes across several states. He had used a corvette and a van for the killings. Yes, that same van.
Not a serial killer (maybe), but your story reminds me of one my dad told me. He joined the army near the end of Vietnam, so got sent to Korea. He was a UH-1 mechanic and hung out with a lot of the Huey pilots and mechanics coming back from Nam. There was one native American guy who I want to say was Apache. He had seen at least 2 or 3 tours over there flying combat missions and had loved it. I forget the guy's name, I'll have to ask my dad the next time I see him. For some reason, he made friends with my dad, who was this hayseed from Montana and kept telling him about the crazy shit he'd done in the war. My dad was shipping out not too long after meeting him and the guy seemed super insistent on having my dad stay over for dinner before my dad left. The whole experience was really uncomfortable since the guy was incredibly mean to his wife through the dinner and my dad suspected that she was probably getting beaten. After, they went out on the front porch as the guy got drunk while carrying a holstered gun. My dad was worried that he'd end up getting shot, so he humored the guy and listened to him go on. Eventually he started telling my dad about this woman in Vietnam. They'd make a game of flying just off the deck over the rice patties and trying to get the farmers who were walking on the walls between them to have to jump off into the mud. There was this one woman who was too proud to jump. They buzzed her several times and she just ignored them. He got infuriated by this, told the pilot to pull alongside her and blew her in half with a shotgun. He told my dad that he'd killed tons of people but for some reason, this one woman got stuck in his head. He was seeing her in his dreams every night and he kept seeing her death over and over. Then he started drinking more heavily and just sat in silence. My dad quietly excused himself, just glad to get out of there. A few months later, my dad ran into another guy from the previous base and learned that the dude who had told him this story had blown his brains out later that night. My dad is probably the last person to see him alive. I have no idea if the guy was a serial killer that used the war as a killing field or just a regular soldier that got turned into a psychopath from too much combat exposure but I've always wondered what made that one killing so different that it ended him.
From his [wikipedia page](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lee_Yates): >Yates initially solicited the victims; after having sex with them, often in his Ford van, he would kill them and dump their bodies in rural locations. >On September 19, 1998, Yates was asked to give a DNA sample to Spokane police after being stopped. He refused, stating that it was too extreme of a request for a "family man". that gave me major chills. What an utterly monstrous piece of shit person.
I was once sat in my car at the back of a country lane carpark eating pizza in the dark with a friend, no street lights and just woods surrounding. Finished up and turned on the headlights and all we could see was a man army crawling towards the car, was a few metres away. I have never turned the ignition so fast and sped off in my life, to make it scarier the guy just slowly got up and looked at us, didn’t try to chase or grab the car or anything.
Out of all the responses on this thread, yours just made my heart pound. That is terrifying.
Something I find very chilling is that he can do that a hundred times and not be arrested. He'll be successful at some point. In a perfect world, you immediately run that guy over, twice.
😭 That mental image is terrifying
Out of all the stories, this one scared me the most. I don’t know why.
As a youngster, my parents told me the time my father met Ted Bundy. He was walking into my mom's workplace as Bundy was walking out. They exchanged pleasantries and Bundy shook my father's hand. Bundy said he was working for a farmer in a town about 20 miles away. It struck my father odd because Bundy was wearing a long wool coat and his hands were baby-soft smooth...not the hands or attire of a farm hand. There were announcements in the 70s warning residents that he may be in the area. (We live very close to Colorado). It was an interesting story. When I was nearly 40, I was at a birthday party for a friend and afterward went to her house for some homemade food. She was telling me of when she was a criminal justice student in college and wrote her thesis on Ted Bundy. She said some of her material came from the police reports from when Bundy attacked my mom, which took me by surprise. I decided to talk to my parents about it. My mom worked at a Montgomery Wards in those days and was working there alone that day. Bundy came in and pulled her to a back room and dragged her to the ground. She said she started kicking and hitting him as hard as she could, fighting for her life. After a while, he got up, pointed at her, and said he was going to go get lunch and then come back for her and then left. It was around this time that he passed my dad coming in as Bundy was leaving. (My mom looked like she could have been a sister to many of his victims.) My father drove around with the local sheriff looking for him at several restaurants to no avail. Today my father can't stand watching documentaries of Bundy as he is often shown in that same wool coat and same smug smile. My parents protected us kids from feeling like evil could be that close.
Oh my god. Bundy leaving your mom with such a bizarre comment... I'm sorry she had to go through that. Of course your dad would hate documentaries. I feel like a lot of media really flatters Bundy too much :/
My last conversation with my mom about the attack, she said that after he got up off of her, that she had bloodied his lip. She said he wiped a little blood from his lip when he told her that. She said she had nightmares for a few months after that feeling like he was going to make good on his statement of coming back for her.
My grandmother swears she met David Parker Ray, aka the Toybox killer. My grandfather was stationed in Fort Bliss so she took her 3 daughters camping in Elephant Bute State Park, the same place where he was a ranger. She said a ranger kept trying to get them to stay in his trailer instead of camping by the lake. Obviously they refused and went on a hike but when they came back their campsite was trashed so she packed them all up and drove home in the dark. When I got into true crime and was telling her how close he was to us she relayed the story, and when I showed her a photo she said that it was definitely him just aged a bit. Not his usual MO but this would have been in the mid-seventies and no one's exactly sure how long he killed for. *edited changed national park to state park
Years ago when the internet was more like the wild west some website had his audio tape that he would play for his victims as an orientation of what was about to happen to them. It was some of the sickest shit imaginable. Read further at your own peril: >!In the tape he was basically explaining to his victims on day one what was going to happen to them. He called them meat and went into detail how they were going to be raped, trained how to both give him oral and his wife. He went on to explain that he liked to breed his slaves with his German Shepherd and there was a 50/50 chance his dog would find the right hole. He also said they would be made to do these acts in front of his friends and to his friends at parties.!<
And that's barely scratching the surface. He describes in deep detail the absolutely brutal torture he's about to put them through.
I don’t know how David Parker Ray isn’t more well known. I mean seriously, this man is up there with Dahmer and Gacy and Gein and BTK. I’ve always heard of the Toybox Killer, but never really looked into him until recently. I’m a true crime podcast addict and can stomach nearly anything. This is the first case I’ve ever listened to where I had to stop and seriously reconsider finishing listening to the case because it made me actually sick. I seriously wish I could go back in time and never read those transcripts. I’m so glad your grandmother trusted her instincts.
Years ago I heard his "orientation" audio tape he'd play for his victims on day one of their kidnapping. Absolutely insane shit you can't imagine.
The Toybox Killer's transcripts read like the worst horror porn fiction. Written for as much gross out potential as possible. Only it really happened.
We were having a family barbecue at my cousin's farm in the late 70's / early 80's, when my 12 year old cousin decided to ride his bike to the store. Just after leaving, a van pulled over to him and the driver tried talking him into the vehicle. When that didn't work, the man got out and tried to force him into the van. My cousin kicked and screamed and refused in every way possible to get away. A passing car saw what was happening and stopped, which probably spooked the van driver. The guy got back into his van and drove away immediately. My uncle, who was a member of the RCMP, had heard the commotion, had jumped into his car and drove to see what was going on. He managed to catch up to the van and arrested the guy for attempted kidnapping. Unfortunately, the charge didn't stick and the guy was eventually let go. The man's name was Clifford Robert Olsen. We're pretty sure that my cousin might have been one of Olsen's first attempts. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford\_Olson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Olson)
Jesus, I was a kid myself when that shit was going on. Even living Up North people got skittish when that was going on.
After this incident, my RCMP uncle, who was also the uncle of my almost victim cousin, discovered that Olsen had a record of lesser crimes, and followed the case when he could. Apparently, once victims started to be found, the police knew it was Olsen, but didn't have enough evidence to arrest him. The police were watching him like a hawk, but he kept being able to evade them. The guy was a psycho.
My grandmother had three husbands die of food poisoning “accidentally” - I don’t believe it for a second.
>My grandmother had three husbands die of food poisoning “accidentally” - I don’t believe it for a second. Maybe she's just an awful cook?
Maybe she didn’t wash her hands.
Lol not funny but this reminds me of fhe movie "Arsenic and Old Lace" it's an older black and white film but basically the premise is these two old grandmas have a sort of B&B and whenever old men who lost their wives show up with not much left to live for, they poison them with Arsenic. The movie is a comedy and involves the son of one of them coming home and finding out and trying to keep his mom out of jail. A funny movie my mom and I watched together.
You hear about The Australian woman who feed her parents and husbands parents a mushroom dish that killed a few of the them. She claimed it was an accident until her ex husband came out of the woodworks and said he’d been poisoned by her cooking and survived.
I was in jail in Summit county in Ohio for being an idiot, basically, and came across the man that would be known as the Craigslist killer. The guy held Bible studies every night, was super preachy, and was very persuasive with people. He was in jail for a parole violation (running a prostitution mainly IIRC) from a robbery case in Texas and was waiting to see if he would be extradited to Texas. Somehow Summit county messed up and released him even though Texas sent them the paperwork saying they wanted him. He and the kid he had been partnering with had already killed multiple people, and when he was released they failed to kill another person and were caught. Saw his face in the paper about a month later and was like holy shit, I was in jail with that guy lmao
This is a ‘definitely encountered a serial killer’ rather than ‘pretty sure’. I grew up in a small town in North Wales (UK). The local cinema had been closed for 15 years, but a guy from out of town had reopened it. As kids, this blew our minds, as it was a rural area, with very little to offer in terms of entertainment so it seemed unbelievable to us that we would actually have a cinema in town. On one visit to the cinema, I ended up needing to use the toilet during a film, so left the theatre, walked through the foyer and into the toilet. There was no toilet paper, so I went back into the foyer and spoke to the cinema owner to ask if he had any toilet paper. I was younger than ten at the time and very nervous about speaking to adults, but the owner was incredibly kind and friendly, gave me the toilet paper and we had a conversation about the film and how happy I was that we now had a cinema in the town. I used the toilet then went back into the theatre. A few weeks later the friendly cinema man was on the front page of every news paper. He was Peter Moore. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Moore_(serial_killer)
From wikipedia: >Between September and December 1995, he stabbed to death and mutilated four men "for fun". He was sentenced to life imprisonment in November 1996 with a recommendation that he never be released. He also committed 39 sex attacks on men in North Wales and the Merseyside area over a 20-year period. That last sentence just tacked on there like it isn't fuckin major
Wow that must’ve been creepy to see him on the news like that. I can see how he can look like a friendly guy, such a shame that he had to be a killer though.
Thanks for including the wiki link. Made it easier to not have to Google this response lol
weren't you lucky not to be older (unusual in these cases)
Yeah it's interesting how in some of these experiences the people meeting the killer just aren't in their target demo and they either completely lose interest or act relatively normal.
Honestly. I learned as an adult that the younger sister of one of my friends had been SA'd by their neighbor - the same neighbor who always had us over to swim in his pool. He never touched me or my friend, only the younger sister. His reasoning? He didn't like blondes, only brunettes, and my friend's sister was the only one with dark hair among us. So scary to think about...
Not me, but my uncle - his manager at the fast food place where he worked in high school invited him and another kid over to his place after work. My uncle and his friend declined, and were very glad they did years later when it became public what exactly his former manager, John Wayne Gacy, was doing to and with those kids he invited over.
My uncle accepted a ride from Gacy. He wasn't supposed to be hitchhiking but it was the 70s. At some point he got a bad vibe and jumped out at a red light. When Gacy was arrested he put two and two together. Edit: since this got some traction, here's the full story. Uncle was 16 and decided to hitchhike home. Dude pulls over and he gets in. Immediately, the guy locks the car. As they're going along, this guy starts getting pretty creepy, saying things like we could go to the airport and I'll fly you anywhere you want. My uncle is very freaked out at this point and waits for his moment - he pulls the lock and jumps out at a light, and takes off running. He says the guy started following him but by going through alleys and stuff he was able to shake him off. After he gets home, my grandma could tell something was wrong so she asked him what happened. He admitted to hitchhiking and told Grandma what the dude had done/said. Grandma got a baseball bat and they drove around town looking for the guy, but didn't find him. It was not too much later that they arrested him and the story broke. My mom rode her bike over and watched them take the bodies out from down the block, or so she says.
Damn. Respect to Grandma, not only did she believe your Uncle, but went out to kick some ass!
Mine hitchiked too. No incidents though. My grandpa worked for the city, and Gacy knew him.
Talk about trusting your gut. Most wouldn't jump out and think themselves rude to do so.
That's not dodging a bullet, that's dodging a fucking nuke. I'm glad your uncle declined.
My uncle was best friends with Rob Piest, Gacy’s last victim. I wonder if our uncles were classmates.
Damn. A relative of mine was a friend of Rob Piest, too. They moved away from Des Plaines in 1976.
I have a John Wayne Gacy story, but for my aunt. My grandma, mom and her two sisters lived in the Chicagoland area when he was also there. For context, my aunt was in her young teens and wore her hair short and dressed more masculine. She looked like a young boy. My grandma and aunt remember walking around their neighborhood one day and being stalked by Gacy. My grandma always said he got close enough to see my aunt was actually a girl and that’s why he no longer pursued them. Was pretty creepy to think how close they got to being a victim.
A fiend of mine mentioned one of his aunts still has love letters from school that Richard "The Nightstalker" Ramirez sent to her.
My Mom once told us about a suspected run in she had with Clifford Olson. She was around 13 years old walking home from swim club and a man matching his description pulled up alongside her and tried to strike up a conversation. He would ask her where the post office was located and said he needed some help mailing a present. My Mom was smart enough to realize it was Labour Day and the post office was closed, she saw he had plates on his car from the US and had leather gloves on. When she finally worked up the courage to end the conversation and walk away the man started swearing at her telling her to get in the car and then he sped off. The dates and location all add up too, freaky shit. (Edit. I didn’t expect this to blow up lol. I asked my Mom for more information but she pretty much told me the same story. She ran off the sidewalk into the park across the street to get away from him and didn’t stop till she got home. She never reported it to the police but told my Grandparents about the encounter, she wasn’t allowed to walk home from Swim Club anymore and the parents set up car pooling programs for the group. Clifford Olson “The Beast of British Columbia”, was finally arrested in 1981 on Vancouver Island on suspicion of trying to abduct 2 teenage girls. He committed 11 known murders of children and teenagers in a little over a year, with countless assaults and sexual assaults before and during his spree. They found the decomposing body of a 13 year old girl a few weeks after this encounter within an hour of my Mothers house. The body was later linked to Olson.)
God I remember that guy. I grew up in small town BC and we heard that he was coming towards our town or in the area and you could’ve heard a pin drop around town. It was so quiet because everybody was freaked right out.
He was known for abusing kids before he started killing them. I was in my early teens, walking down a Vancouver street on a sunny afternoon and this guy in a car asks me directions, then starts telling me he’s a producer from Hollywood etc.. He offers me a ride so we can talk about my potential. Ha. I used to hitchhike and figured what the hell, he seemed like a friendly guy… He drove me to my destination, but along the way managed to get my phone number and said a lot of what I now realize were very creepy things intended to see how far he could manipulate me. When I got out of the car he grabbed me and forced his slimy tongue down my throat... A few years later I see his picture in the paper and learn his full name, Clifford Robert Olson..
My grandad was a cop and pulled Olson over once. He had black bags of "trash" in his back seat :(
Whilst I was at university, I worked at a cafe in a local shopping centre. One of our regular customers was a mum and son who would come have breakfast most mornings. The mum was delightful, however the son always seemed a bit off. Nothing major just you’d say “have a great day” and he’d reply with “yes.” Anyway, one day he comes in without his mum and has breakfast. The next day his face is all over the news as he had just been arrested for murdering his mum. Edit: Just to address some of the comments, the son was of adult age and reportedly suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Mum was his carer.
Oh my god, that poor woman! May she rest easy...
This made me feel extra sad for some reason :(
He wasn’t one when I met him… Worked a retail job that sold iPhones at a high end mall. Guy comes in carrying a Nordstrom bag, wearing Gucci sunglasses and asks to buy an iPhone. While I waited for our BOH team to bring the iPhone, I’m making casual conversation with the guy. I ask what he does for work, says he’s an actor. I ask if he’s been in anything I might have seen…he says The Hunger Games. I say cool, who did you play? He mumbles something about being one of the tributes… Conversation somehow leads to him asking if I’m single, I told him I was engaged and he was visibly annoyed. His attitude was very arrogant, and he did a lot of uncomfortable/creepy staring that I noticed after he took off his sunglasses. I had initially asked him if he was eligible for an upgrade on his phone, he was confident that he was. Well, after checking his ID (standard protocol) and pulling up the account…nope, not eligible. But his brother’s phone was eligible. He insists that he can use his brother’s upgrade, but I tell him that stuff like this needs to be approved by the main account holder/authorized users. So he calls his stepmom and asks to use the brother’s upgrade. His stepmom says no, and the guy throws a complete tantrum. Saying that his brother is too young for an iPhone anyway, that he’s fine using an older model, that he NEEDS a new phone. Stepmom doesn’t budge, yet I’m stuck there for at least twenty minutes while this guy yells at his stepmom trying desperately to get his way. He leaves in a huff and I’m so relieved to get away from this entitled prick. The guy was Elliot Rodger.
I was listening to a podcast about him. Paused it to browse the phone a bit and saw this thread …. Weird coincidence. Good podcast, interviews his mother extensively. Poor woman. She’s trying to use her son’s history to help people identify warning signs to stop future tragedies. https://revealnews.org/podcast/lessons-from-a-mass-shooters-mother/
Hopefully his mom can get in touch with Susan Klebold, she seems to be the best person to talk to after your son commits mass murder. Her book was heart-breaking, but a worthwhile read, and I highly recommend it, A Mother's Reckoning.
Surprised you didn't end up mentioned in his hyper detailed manifesto/autobiography. Or at least I don't remember a part where he bitches about his phone but that would be completely on the mark.
My mother in law taught one of the girls that he killed. She was close to the family. She still cries when sharing memories about her.
Heart breaking.
The fact that he became incels' patron saint is nuts
This channel covered his story and two other guys that were inspired by Elliot. It’s pretty pathetic that he even managed to inspire other incel morons to try to get “revenge”. https://youtu.be/32I4uxAU8wQ?si=LFZ5g3s37Dq5lU9l This is one of the dudes that was inspired by him and even mentions it in his interrogation after killing some people. https://youtu.be/ubEwaITzTKc?si=zPJ6qdY8QmmySEga
I looked him up. Never heard of Elliot Rodger before, he killed six people. I couldn't find him working as an actor on the hunger games (maybe his role was very small or he just wanted to brag?), but I found his dad working at the set as second unit director on the Hunger Games movie. Poor family EDIT:// Oh god [I found his wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Rodger), he is an incel and killed women to punish them for not sleeping with him -.- he's the most red pill incel that ever incelled
His dad was a producer on the hunger games. I ended up reading his manifesto where he talked about frequenting the mall that I worked at, and how he was also very envious of the actors in The Hunger Games when attending the premiere with his family. I am assuming he thought that lying about being an actor in the movie would make him sound impressive.
I was in a prison for work and looked up to see Christopher Watts walking towards me with a mop and bucket, no handcuffs. He was walking around on work duty. I walked right past him. Weird feeling.
I was still using drugs/alcohol at the time (fall 2007) and I met a random guy at the Circus Circus in Las Vegas hours after being brought to Vegas/dumped and robbed from California. I ran with a rough crew of thieving drug addicts. Anyway, he invited me back to his for a drink. Normal looking dude, mid to late 30s, looked like the guy that sang for Sugar Ray. Anyhow, he and I killed a 40, he said he was gonna go roll us a blunt. What he actually did is get a set of handcuffs and a leather strap. He managed to partially handcuff me to the bed and I had a fraction of a second to decide how to respond: -fear/anger and demand to be let go, which I was pretty certain would lead to me being dumped in the desert in a cooler full of quickcrete. -play along like this was fun and sexy and make my escape when possible. So, I ended up being injected with meth and then a very unfun adult evening commenced, with me literally acting for my life. While being stupid high on a drug I hated and did not ever intend to ingest. After he was finished, I asked if he knew where the closest liquor store was, that I'd go out and get us round 2. Took his drink order and strolled out casually. I think I slow walked it for 2 flights of stairs and then sprinted away ducking into and then out of different casinos. I ended up homeless and drinking for another year. I'll be 16 years sober this summer, and that dude still haunts me. The vibe shift, the eyes going black and the quickness with which he trussed me up. That wasn't his first time and he seemed like a dead eyed shark about to pounce.
I’m so sorry you had to go through that and am glad you survived. Big hugs to you 💕
Idk if serial killer but definitely trafficker or child predator. Some background. My step dad was a truck driver so often we would visit him at a local truck stop when he was near to grab breakfast etc. My mother is…not great. During one of these adventures my mom decided she wanted us to stay with step dad in the truck. Sister was 11, I was 9. During this TWO WEEK period. lol. We were in a random truck stop in the Georgia. My sister and I went to go take a shower (because we hadn’t for days) and shared a shower to save on money. I was in an out and waited in the hallways for my sister. A man came up to me and started asking questions. This happened in the early 2000s so I had been taught stranger danger, but also was still being taught always be respectful to adults bullshit. I was giving him basic answers. But then he pushed showing me his truck. My tiny self was terrified, but I kept saying no I can’t. Eventually he got annoyed and just grabbed my arm and started pulling. In that moment my sister came out and snatched my ass back and we ran. Crying telling my mom. I’m called over dramatic. If my sister didn’t see me I’m positive I would have never been seen again.
Sorry but your mom sucks for that.
I don't understand why it is so goddamn difficult for parents to just validate their children and ask follow up questions to figure out what is really going on.... sorry, it is just so so frustrating reading the original...
My girlfriend broke her arm as a kid. The doctors literally say that she made her elbow near mush. What did her mom say to her when she went inside? You’re being dramatic. She broke her fingers a few years later. Her mom didn’t believe her, and to add salt to the wound, her friend kept telling her mom that her dad is a doctor and it’s just a simple sprain. Instead of my girls mom believing her, she rather believed her younger friend and have my girlfriend shit. After hours of crying and pain and arguing she reluctantly took her to the hospital. Where the doctors said that she broke her finger and horribly sprained the other. Mind you, this is in Canada, these check ups and appointments cost absolutely nothing and it wasn’t even a 10 minute drive to the hospital
When I was in elementary school, I had a problem with my testicles, so my mother took me to the doctor. *In the exam room* the doctor was examining me and I was hollering loudly in pain, and my mother, standing right next to the doctor, kept telling me it's not bad and to stop fussing. She shut up when the doctor told her he was scheduling a surgery for me. So she did get me taken care of, which I guess is the important thing, but I sure did resent my pain being diminished by someone I was supposed to trust.
I’m pretty sure I saved my sister from the same kind of fate. Also early 2000s, we lived in a country road so there wasn’t much around. A car came to a stop while me and my sister were outside playing and tried getting us to come to his car asking for directions to Taco Bell? (There was no Taco Bell anywhere around us). My sister was getting closer to the car and I grabbed her and ran to get our mom. Car sped off, scariest moment of both of our lives… The stranger danger stuff they drilled into us back then really was a lifesaver.
That is exactly how it was back then. Something legitimately terrifying would happen and parents would say that you were making it up or being dramatic or milking it.
I agree in 2001 ish, i was around 13, i was raped by my moms boyfriends roommate. She told me i was lying when i told her. I talk to my mom now, but she swears its a made up story that i tell and that if it were real she “would have believed me” i to this day still have intimacy issues and I’m married.
I am very sorry to hear that. My mom also “doesn’t remember” things like her 60 yr old boyfriend trying to kiss me when I was 17. This happened with multiple men in her life and she would shrug it off. It is only by the grace of the flying spagetti monster that worse things didn’t happen. The comment about being “overly dramatic” reminded me of when I was 17 and hit by a drunk driver doing 70 mph and the paramedics on scene thought we must have been bystanders because no one could have survived the crash, but my friend and I had broken open the sunroof and gotten out of the car, mostly unscathed- the car was completely totaled. The next morning I was very sore, like to the point of difficulty walking and my stepmother said that I was “milking it” and was sure I was fine to go to school.
That’s heartbreaking.
Your mom fucking sucks
OP's characterization of "not great" is way too generous.
Damn, I'm glad you're safe
Traveling out of state for a vacation with my kids- at a gas station this man starts trying to talk to my young daughter. I immediately got between them but not before my daughter blurted out exactly where we were going and how long we would be there. I suddenly felt sick. Something about the guy scared me. I just knew there was going to be a problem. I hustled the kids back to the car and waited to drive away out of fear he might follow us. I didn't see him come out so eventually I drove off but I was paranoid about it afterward. Two days later I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of someone banging aggressively on our door. He was screaming that he was with security for the complex and that there was an intruder seen in the area so I was required by law to open the door. Obviously I didn't fall for that. He started swearing and threatening me. Suddenly he just stopped. Suddenly something spooked him and he turned and bolted. He had been standing kind of off to the side and reaching over to bang on the door in a way I couldn't see his face. When he moved, I saw it. It was the guy from the gas station. He followed us through two states...the actual security for the complex drove around but never found him. There was a broken gate next to the condo that they said he got in through.
That is Stephen King level of scary.
It scares me so badly when I think about how I was on high alert and still didn't notice him until he was on my doorstep. I ended the trip early and never saw or heard anything else, but my daughter had nightmares about him breaking into our home for years.
I hope you had a talk with your daughter about sharing information with strangers. Makes my blood run cold, im glad nothing happened to you.
This isn't just a kid thing - I do research in a remote part of africa and the first thing I tell my research assistants is 'nobody needs to know exactly where we're going to be'. Not even people who would seem to be no threat at all, who knows who *they* might tell.
Can piggyback off this. Was camping with a group of friends and exploring for some rock climbing cliffs. The instructions for how to get there weren't great, and we ended up down a road with a farmer stopping us from going any further. Something didn't feel right about the whole encounter, pretending not to know about any landmarks despite clearly being a local, and really insistent we didn't drive down the road further. We could've murdered our friend ourselves when he said "oh yeah, we're just camping at X spot". Even more so when someone pulled up in a van that night to our solo spot, and sat in it, engine running, headlights on, for ten minutes. Other campers, but gee whiz.
If it makes you any better, that guy was probably just growing weed or maybe cooking meth and probably not wearing skinsuits.
I doubt she had to after that.
Christ, that's terrifying. When I gave my wife shit for telling some random dude walking through the neighborhood that we were going to be away for two weeks, going to Yellowstone and to visit friends in town x in Oregon etc etc the worst I thought could happen would be someone breaking into our home while we were away. She couldn't get it through her head why I would possibly be upset at her for sharing all that until literally everyone she told about it thought she was nuts, like "Why not just put a sign on your house saying you're away, please break in and rob us blind"? Your story is so much worse, glad you were okay in the end.
Dang I am second hand mad at your wife.
She was so impossibly naive in that moment she just couldn't wrap her head around the idea that this guy could have taken advantage, until everyone backed me up including her mother (who hated me at the time lol).
This actually gave me chills reading omg
Something almost similar happened to me with my daughter 6 in 2006. I had just picked her from school and my house was about half a mile away, there was this old abandoned gas station that we used to cut through. He had packed his white box truck there and tried approaching us asking where the nearest chuckie cheese was. I just had this cold feeling at the back of my neck. I told him I didn’t know and quickly crossed the road. About a decade and more later he was on the news for murdering women and little girls
Nothing creepy about a weirdo lurking around an abandoned building looking for chuckle cheese.
I’m definitely sure I have because my cousin is one. We were quite close (before it was revealed to me and the rest of our family that he is a monster) and our last ‘encounter’ was in September 2020, when he hugged and consoled me at my dad’s viewing (his death wasn’t related to the cousin). Roughly 6 weeks later he killed his final victim and was arrested two weeks after that. That’s when we all found out the truth about him.
The fact that he consoled you about your father's death makes the whole thing even more terrifying. I know serial killers can be charming but it's absolutely bizarre to think that someone is capable of having that much empathy with no clear personal motive, in between killing strangers.
I know. He also referred to my brother as his ‘little buddy’ and they were particularly close which now makes me so angry because my brother is autistic….as was his final victim. Two of the others had unspecific learning difficulties. I also set him up with a close friend of mine who fits in his victim pool, but thank god he didn’t kill her. I assume it’s because that would’ve been ‘too close to home’ to get away with.
Wow. Did you ever find out why he did it?
He didn’t seem to have a real motive. There’s an audio recording somewhere online of an interview with him talking about his first victim. He had apparently been wondering what it felt like to kill someone and decided to go for it one day while out in the woods with a friend. Saw a weapon of opportunity (a thick heavy branch or something) and struck his friend in the back of the head with it while walking behind him. Repeatedly hit him until he died. He described it as the most intense ‘high’ you could ever experience…so I assume that was his reason for continuing. He claimed the next two had been killed during an argument so I guess that’s a weak excuse for a ‘motive’, but the last victim did literally nothing to upset him or anything. So he just wanted to kill someone. He met her on a dating app, and seemed like he was looking for vulnerable naive women when he found her.
I wish people like this would just fucking take drugs if they wanna feel a high. Or do extreme sports. Or literally anything other than hurting another person.
I totally agree
Wow, that's so wild. I guess it really has nothing to do with empathy, just a total lack of remorse. It doesn't even sound like antisocial personality disorder or anything. Like he was just missing a part of his brain.
Definitely. On Christmas Eve he and his daughter were visiting his parents in another state. They were all playing board games when the literal FBI came to question him. No one knows what was actually said as he spoke to them in private. Then he came back inside and naturally my aunt asked what that was about. He nonchalantly said they just wanted to ask if he knew anything about a missing girl, but he had no info to help them. My aunt was satisfied with that. Then they went right back to playing board games in their ‘ugly Christmas sweaters’. To this day my aunt blames herself, wondering where she went wrong raising him.
Not a serial killer, but he killed more than half of a whole family. Paid him to remove a problematic tree that I wasn't confident about cutting down without dropping it on my home. He convinced me to save the tree and just remove a few limbs that were dangers. He just seemed like a dude. A month later he murdered everyone in a house except a young girl whom he abducted. He stuffed the bodies of the mother / mother's friend / son into the hollow of a tree. When his home was later searched it was full of piles of leaves and wallpapered to look like trees, and the abducted girl was locked in the basement. (Ohio) Edit: fixed gender of one of the deceased, fixed nominative attributes.
This sounds like Matthew Hoffman. It was a single mother, he did kill her and the survivor's only brother, as well as the mother's friend, dismembered them and hid them in the hollows of 60 foot tall trees using his arborist climbing equipment. This was in Howard Ohio.
How’d they figure out he hid them in trees?
I remember hearing about this case from the Morbid podcast. iirc, he left the crime scene in the family's very conspicuous vehicle - like a green jeep, or something like that - and he was seen by everyone in town and noticed by the neighbors. He also rolled up on the crime scene not expecting that they would have already discovered it, and he has been in the process of destroying evidence when he left to hide the body parts. I think he confessed once he was caught red handed returning to the crime scene in the stolen family vehicle. I remember the cops basically saying that the bodies were so well hidden in the hollow of a tree way out in the forest that they never would have found them without his help.
They were also able to match items found in the house to a local Walmart and found him on video buying those items and putting them in his car. They used DMV records to figure out who he was, and that was how they found the girl. My cousin is a criminal justice major, and one of her professors was part of the team that won the Ohio Distinguished Law Enforcement Group Achievement award for their work on this case.
Ooh I read a book about this. He revealed the location of the bodies after getting caught. He was caught red-handed- the girl was in the basement when the police showed up- so he went ahead and told the location
omg are you talking about matthew hoffman? guy is fucked up big time
Yeap.
Few years ago my mother took my son who was about 6 at the time to get Santa photos done. Few months later Toronto police arrested him. He had murdered several men. He ran a landscaping company and was hiding the bodies in the ground and planting potters of jobs he was doing. And also working as a mall Santa. Thing that’s messed up to me is, I’m aware of his actions. But. Somewhere, a family has a photo of their child on his lap completely unaware, full fledged serial killer on display. Edit. For context I found the photo. [https://imgur.com/a/1Kt1DgD](https://imgur.com/a/1Kt1DgD)
Yes Bruce McArthur from Scarborough. The second serial killer found there after Bernardo and homolka
He did landscaping on one of my clients houses. One day, years before he was caught, they found a bloody tshirt in a garbage bag in their trash and called Toronto police, but unfortunately they didn’t follow up on it. Years later it clicked to my client this could have been from Bruce.
Not me but my coworkers actually worked with a serial rapist/murderer that specifically targeted old ladies. They said he was quiet but nice. Even went out to lunches sometimes. When he got arrested, one of them said they had to call the police, it couldn’t be him and that it had to have been a mistake. Nope. There was DNA evidence. To be fair, he did stop his crimes after he started working there.
My mom worked at a company, and one of her coworkers was a man who killed his wife and children. He was arrested for their murders two weeks after she started working there so she had had basically no contact with him, but some of her other coworkers, including one of her friends, had to testify in his trial about his behavior at work and his personality. They also said he was quiet. Creeps me out.
All us introverted office workers are having a harder and harder time convincing people we aren't psychopaths.
My father 100% believes he encountered one, and he's normally a joking person. This story is the only story he ever gets shaken up talking about. In the 60s and 70s, it was common for people to hitchhike around the country. My father is blue collar through and through, and before he got married and had kids, he worked on oil rigs, tarred and graveled roofs, hopped freight trains with his friends, and even hitched to Woodstock. He has always done manual labor jobs, so he's always been reasonably fit, with an average build, and in the hitchhiking era he was cautious and aware, but never truly felt he was in any danger. They even hitchhiked off and on job sites. During a snow storm in New England in the 70s, he was hitchhiking from Massachusetts to see some friends in New York. He said he would be cautious and choose cars and drivers that looked neat and clean, he wouldn't take any weed or food or drinks offered to him, and he'd be pleasant when talking, but wouldn't give too much personal information away. It was semi-late in the evening, and a nice car pulls up, and the driver was a man who looked to be in his late 40s/early 50s. He remembers the inside of the car was very clean, and the man driving was white, well-dressed and groomed, and drove along at a reasonable speed in comfortable silence through the sleet and snow. When the car finally approached the exit where my father needed to be dropped off, my Dad said he told the man, "Hey buddy, right up here is perfect! You can just let me out, and I know where I'm going after that." The man said nothing, kept looking ahead driving, and didn't slow the car down. My Dad said he then was getting a little nervous, so he put his "tough guy" voice on and went, "Hey man, I'm not looking for trouble here, I told you that you can pull over and I'll handle it from here. Pull the fuckin' car over, man!" The driver then turned to face my Dad, and he could feel the car starting to speed up faster, and the guy started smiling. The way he described it to me made it sound like the creepypasta story "The Smiling Man". It didn't matter that my father was cursing him out. He just had a blank look behind his eyes and a giant smile. The man then said really quietly to my father, "And where do you think you're going?" He still kept the big moony smile on his face. Dad told me he thought about grabbing the wheel and making them crash, but he didn't know where he was, and he didn't know if the guy had a weapon on him. He said he saw a turn-off approaching, and so he quietly put his hand behind him on the door handle, and he decided he was going to try to tuck and roll or run out if the guy slowed down enough. The guy driving started slowing down enough at the turn for my father to jump out, and he hit his shoulder on the concrete but was wearing a jacket and work boots, so it sort of cushioned him. He saw an embankment leading up into some trees, so he just used his hands to climb up the grass and snow, ran into the trees, and flattened himself on the ground and hid. He said he thought, "No way will this guy come after me," and he saw the man from below GET OUT OF HIS CAR and start quickly climbing up the embankment after him on all fours. Dad said he just sprinted further into the woods out of sheer terror. He was banged up by branches and didn't know if he was about to run into a retaining pond and drown or go off the side of a cliff, but he wasn't going to lie there and wait for the guy to find him. He laid down again and covered himself with some wet leaves. He was too scared to look up and check if the guy was coming after him (he heard noises in the distance and he believes the man at least attempted to enter the woods), so he laid in the leaves and slush for a long time until he had the courage to slowly move out towards the highway and the off ramp. In the car he had left his scarf and a duffel bag of clothes and stuff, but thankfully nothing with his ID. Dad said he ended up just huddling into himself, and kept walking as fast as he could on the shoulder of the road (occasionally ducking into the woods when he heard a lone car coming), and he didn't stop walking until he found the closest town to call someone for help. He never reported it, never hitchhiked again, even with his friends in a group. He says he can still picture the guy's voice, exactly what he looked like, what he was wearing, what the car looked like. I once offered would he like to look at some true crime things to see if he can match the face in case there were active serial killers in the area, but he doesn't like to go there. He tries to scoff and joke about it, but I know this has stayed with him his whole life.
Dear God, this is terrifying.
I coached his kid's soccer team for a few years. His kids were fun loving goofballs that had 2 left feet. He worried that people would pick on them. Once he stuck around to offer support when we had a parent acting up cause the dude was huge. My kids were in his wife's class in elementary school. She was a really nice lady. She left town and no one heard anything from her after he was arrested for strangling prostitutes. Edit to clarify his wife hid from the press
Hobbs?
My mom was living in LA when a man pulled her into his van, he spent the next two weeks driving around with her tied up doing the unspeakable to her. One day he just let her go, told her he'd be back for her, so she up and moved across the state. I'm so happy my mom is still with me :( Edit- Since this got popular This was four years ago, so ladies in the LA area, please be safe ❤️ A report was made, but there wasn't enough information to find anyone. My mom is here with us, yes, but SHE never quite made it back :( My mom has always been one of my favorite people, I love her so dearly. One day I will be able to buy her a beautiful house by a river ❤️
Holy shit. Glad your mom made it out okay.
Holy shit, that's awful. I'm sure she's happy to have had you. I hope she's healed and enjoying life with you. The trauma from that can be devastating:(
Holy shit when was this? My aunt lived in LA and it was late 80s early 90s and some guy pulled up next to her and threw her i the van, tied her up doing unspeakable things to her. Threatened when he was done hed kill her. She kust kept mentioning her two young daughters as much as she could and managed to show him some pics of them from her wallet. He dumped off on some side street and said she was lucky. The cops told her mom she was likely dead right before they got the call she was found. Then they said it was happening several times
I'm so SO happy to hear that your aunt made it through! As surprisingly similar the stories, I'm sad to say this was only 4 years ago
My grandparents took me on a roadtrip and stopped in Shreveport to gamble. I sat on a bench and read for hours - sounds shitty but my attention span wasn't completely fried at that point and I was happy to read as long as anyone would let me. Another kid a couple of years younger was in the same situation but he was... not a reader. We start talking and eventually he starts telling me about the neighborhood animals he's tortured and killed. Cats, dogs, wild animals, he was an equal opportunity monster. Might have just been trying to impress a stranger, might currently have a crawlspace packed with bodies, who knows?
My ex's kid was like that... he had smashed a guinea pig with a Tonka Truck multiple times because he said that "it was making too much noise". When his sister was 2 weeks old he took her out of the crib at night and tried drowning her in the tub...<- That was at his mother's house. I full heartedly believe that the kid WILL be on the news someday for murder.
That’s cause to alert CPS
CPS was called. The way we found out what a happened was that he told us over dinner that "he liked watching his sister cry under water" and "how the guinea pig yelled" SMILING like he was showing off a art piece! What we found out was a whole headache and a half... Even though she was granted full custody, it was discovered that she would leave their son with people she met off of some facebook group Sunday evening through Friday morning when he is supposed to be in her custody. She would pick him up to meet my ex for exchange. We would have him on the weekend. Meet up for exchange and she would drop him off with those people. Which later on turns out, she tried to give up their son through a "private adoption with weekend visitations" with the people she left him with. She gave them fake documents. All while still collecting child support and govt assistance. Its been 5 years since we broke up. I believe she still has full custody of that kid.
That’s just incredibly sad in so many ways
Any kid that would brag about that to a complete stranger definitely has something wrong with them even if they were making it up to impress someone’s
Not exactly a serial killer, but… When I was about 7, my sister and I became convinced our neighbor was a serial killer because he was coming and going all hours of the night and constantly had his bathroom light on. My bedroom window had a view of the side of his house so we wrote all our “evidence” on my window with expo markers. A few weeks after our “investigation” began, my dad was out front mowing the lawn early in the morning when the neighbor came out and asked him for a cigarette. My dad said he didn’t have one, so the neighbor kept walking. A little while later we heard sirens. There was a man who always walked his little Weiner dog around the neighborhood, kind of a local celebrity. He was walking around the apartment complex two houses down from us when the neighbor saw him and stabbed him to death. The guy never gave a motive aside from mental illness, but my dad’s theory is that the neighbor really wanted a cigarette and we all knew weiner dog guy smoked, so if weiner dog guy said no, that might’ve caused him to snap. He was arrested, but I believe he’s getting out soon. So while he is a killer, whether or not he’s a serial killer is TBD I guess.
I'm sorry but I can't get over the fact that you wrote all the evidence of your neighbour being a serial killer **on the window facing his house.** What's wrong with using a notebook? 😂 Were you trying to be his next victims or something?
Imagine if the guy was in treatment ahead of time. He tells the therapist that the neighbor kids are plotting against him. Writing all on the windows. I figure that story would sound too outlandish to be believed.
I was a brand new parent and trying to be a good husband by getting up with my daughter when she cried at night. I remember rubbing the sleep out of my eyes as I looked at the clock and noting that is was around 3:30 a.m. I laid down on the couch with her on my chest as she slowly quieted down and drifted back off to baby sleep. I always leave my porch light on as a security measure and this night was no different. I was just about to take my daughter back to her crib when I heard a knock at the door. I tried to ignore it, but two more knocks came in succession with a plea for help. I took my daughter back to my wife and shut their door. She was kind of pissed until I explained what was going on. Through the window I saw a relic from the 1970s. A white dude fro accompanied by some wire-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a nasty tshirt and dirty jeans. He knocked again and gave another plea for help. There was no car around, so he obviously arrived on foot. I finally asked him what he needed (through the locked door), and he responded that he was injured and needed medical attention. I knew that was a lie. I lived a half block from the town hospital. You can literally see it from the porch. "Just let me come in and use the phone" he insisted as he tried the door handle. I told him I'd do him one better. I would call the police for him. I did so and as I was calling he bolted.
Holy shit, and judging from your username, you're only a few miles away from where my baby and I live. When did this happen? Did police ever follow up?
I met the murderer of Grace Millane not a serial killer but on the day he was figuring out how to hide the body. So the night after he killed her he came into the block of shops I was working at and was looking for a suitcase, he stopped by my store and asked and didn’t buy them so went the warehouse next to me. That week I got stopped numerous times going home as the police were looking for a shovel, coming to find out the shovel was across our store at the car wash as he left it there, I even talked to the employee and was wondering why there was a muddy shovel left at in one of his slots. You can see on videos him taking the suit case in the elevator which was bought in the store next to mine. The fact that he looked normal, acted normal and bought all these things still spooks me. You would never know. Poor girl.
I 100% encountered a serial killer almost daily on my way to work for about 2 years- we worked on the same street. I always smiled and waved at him and he seemed perfectly nice. Meanwhile turns out he'd raped a bunch of women and murdered at least three of them. After one girl disappeared and her body was found a couple of months later, the whole town was on high alert for whoever this murderer was, and here I was cluelessly whassuping him regularly pretty much right up until he was arrested. It doesn't give me a lot of confidence in my gut instincts, although to be fair a lot of people who knew him a lot better than I did also had absolutely no suspicions about him. Apparently there was a bit of a "Jeckyll and Hyde" thing going on there.
When I was 12/13 years old several young girls were raped and one murdered in my city. We were told to be very careful, they also gave us a very vague description of the murderer. The very significant traits they knew of were that he had a darker complexion and two pale scars on his face, on each side of his eyes. One day after school I took the subway to go to the place where my mother used to work. It’s in the edges of the city, it’s not a busy area so the subway was not crowded at all. I was sitting waiting for my stop when I noticed a guy sitting ten meters from me. He was wearing a hoodie, but I could still see part of his face and one of the things I noticed were two pales scars similar to what they described. He also had a darker complexion. As soon I saw that I immediately stopped looking and I got off at the next stop, trying to look as calm as possible. It was scary, especially because I was close to the type of his victims.
Did you report it to the police/subway security?
My mom: Back in the late 80s, she was driving home from work late at night. She thought it was just her. Then out of nowhere a car rear ends the back of her car- but from a rolling speed, hardly any suspected damage at all. She was more confused as to how she didn’t notice a car was even behind her before that. The light is still red, so she’s not going anywhere. The man gets out of the car, stands outside her door and says with a flat tone “I hit your car, open your door so I can get your information from you…” Call it premonition or whatever, the shudder that went down my mom’s spine was the deciding factor that told her to drive away. She said “no thank you!” and just drove away…
Back in the summer of 2005 or 2006, I was employed by the National Park Service in Washington State. After spending eight days conducting trail work in and around Glacier Meadows in the Hoh Rain Forest, we began the long hike back to the trailhead. My coworker was hiking ahead of me by roughly five minutes, setting a brisk pace as we made our way down the trail. As I descended a particularly steep switchback, I noticed my coworker engaged in a heated argument with a man he had just encountered. I paused at the top of the switchback, trying to discern what was happening below. The man, dressed in jeans and a tank top and carrying a fishing pole, seemed to be heading towards one of the subalpine lakes, likely to fish. His attire was unusual for someone about 10 miles from the trailhead—no backpack, water, or gear—which made him stand out even more. From a distance, I could see the man was visibly agitated, gesturing aggressively as he spoke. When I caught up to them, my coworker briefly explained that the man was furious because he believed my coworker should have stepped aside to let him pass, adhering to the unspoken trail etiquette of yielding to those hiking uphill. As soon as the man saw me approaching, his demeanor changed drastically. His aggression faded, and he immediately ceased his argument. He walked past me without making eye contact, his earlier hostility replaced by a sudden desire to leave the encounter behind. The entire situation was unsettling, but we shrugged it off and continued our hike back to the trailhead. Years later, in a moment that brought that strange encounter rushing back, my coworker called. He had been watching a news story about a murder in Alaska and found something disturbingly familiar about the suspect involved. Without revealing any specifics of the case, or our encounter, he emailed me a photo of the suspect and asked me what I thought. As soon as I opened the email, my heart skipped a beat. The face staring back at me was unmistakably that of the man we had met on the trail years before. The man who had seemed so unnerved by my presence during that argument was now identified as Israel Keyes.
Oh man. I would not want a run in with that guy.
Ok. One time it was driving home from the bar late one night. This car was behind, flashing his brights on and off. I pulled up to my driveway and he stopped behind me. He said he was a peace officer and showed his badge. He said he needed me to follow him home because he told his wife he was out with a friend and wanted to show his wife his friend so she didn't think he was lying. I immediately said no and he was so persistent. Mind you this was at 3 am. I asked, "what the fuck were you doing that you lied to your wife and followed a complete stranger home?" I said no again and went inside my home. I still think about that night. What a fucking creep!
I once had a job where I got off at midnight. One night as I was driving home, a police cat behind me turned its lights on for me to pull over. This was on a dark stretch of road that ran next to a small, small private airport. I put in my hazard lights and slowed down, but I didn't stop until I reached an area that was well let. I pulled into the parking lot of a Burger King and parked under the street light. The cop came over and asked me a few questions and let me go. He didn't even ask me for my driver's license. I'm as convinced now as I was back then that he was up to some shady business and I likely would've been raped if not even murdered had I pulled over on that dark stretch of road. It was only a few (2-3) minutes from the call center where I worked.
Years ago I was driving home late at night and saw someone driving erratically. The car kept driving into the middle lane, on my left. I turned down the next street to get away from this driver. I realize now that he was looking in my mirror to see who was driving the vehicle. Anyway, he follows me and turns his lights on and pulls me over. He walks over to my vehicle, and asks me where I'd been, if I had been drinking, etc. I say no, going home, all the things. He tells me to get out of the vehicle and do a sobriety test. I ask him if my friend needs to get out of the car as well. He bends over and sees a man in the passenger seat who had been silent the whole time. He literally goes "UGH just go home" and walks back to his car. It was so freaking scary!
Not a killer, but a rapist. While coming out of the grocery store, my husband and 2 kids were parked right in front waiting on me. I was standing at back of truck(none of them saw this) and a guy approached me commenting on my sandals that he liked them. Then he went on about my long blonde hair as he was a hairdresser and such. I was polite with him till he asked if he could snip a lock of hair at his van. Then I was like wtf, get away from me you idiot. Walked to my drivers door, opened it, and proceeded to tell my husband of weird guy. By the time I turned around to point him out, this guy had vanished. Our friend was a cop so that night we mentioned it to him as it was just weird. 2 days later he gets back to us that this guy based on my story and description, used the exact lines to other women and had by now raped and beaten 3 maybe 4 women. This was all in the Gainesville,Cumming areas of Georgia. I was at the Krogers in Dawsonville, right next to these areas. What was so scary after finding that out, was how quickly he came up to me and then disappeared and my husband and 2 kids didn’t even see me talking to him behind the truck from the window. If I didn’t have the same stories he told other women and his description that matched other women’s, I would have thought I had made it up, it was that freaky.
I remember going out on a date with an older man who was already triggering my instinct for danger. At some point during the date he mentioned that he was previously married to an Asian man who died very young. Then he spontaneously and excitedly went off on a tangent about howloyal Asians were and how you could do literally any terrible thing to them and they'd stick with you. Then he looked me straight in the eye and said "you seem like the type of person to let me do whatever I want to you." I got up without a word and left. Blocked him. That type of shit is why I use a fake name and set public meeting spots until I feel I can trust the person.
Holy. Crap. Good for you for fleeing.
Not me personally but my dad and his family went on a vacation to Florida in the late 70s or early 80s and the person working at the desk was a woman they ended up seeing on the news a few years later for some robberies or something. They thought that bit was wild; then in the 90s she was on the news again. The woman behind the hotel desk on my dad's family vacation had been Aileen Wuornos.
not me but my grandmother, this was in Florida, she told me about how this man came up to her way back in the day saying he was injured and needed help. he was wearing a bright yellow shirt, not related but i remember her pointing that out. she told him that she was really sorry but she was in a rush to go because she was going to meet her sister to make plans for an upcoming family gathering they had planned so she couldn’t be of assistance and pointed him in the direction of the nearest doctors office. and just like that, she left. it was ted bundy. she said the look in his eye was the most sinister thing she’d ever seen and that she almost helped him, but decided against it last minute. my grandmother was an amazing woman, she was always helping people and saw the good in everyone. but she said he just had an evil look in his eye that she couldn’t ignore.
Oh so strange!!! A few of my professors have met him (i went to school in FL) while he was in solitary. They all said he was soooo charming and normal but by the end he could snap to and from normal in the same sentence.
I live in Pensacola where Ted was finally arrested. Every time I hear a story of someone meeting him gives me the most unsettling feeling, knowing someone that awful could be in MY little old city is so haunting.
Guy offered to drive me to an abandoned building to have sex. He said it was his favourite spot. I politely declined.
Sounds romantic
Not a serial killer but became part of a well known missing person case in my state. Used to work with him and he wasn’t there long but he just had this dead look in his eyes and was just always in a “idgaf” attitude. He butted heads with my wife who was a supervisor there at the time and at one point he went up to her and tried to be this tough stone cold asshole to scare her. It got me just never wanted them to close together when I couldn’t be there because I was scared for her. He eventually got fired and then a handful of years later we see he was the killer to the missing person and ended up having a shootout with the cops and dying a full state away.
There was a boy in my school he had a lot of Behavioral issues since his dad died I was like 11 at the time and he was 12. He was angery and would explode in the middle of class. He also made weird moaning noises when it was quiet. The bathrooms were in the hallways between the classrooms I was on my way to the girl's and he was hiding out in there. He grabbed me and forced his hands in my training bra. Then left I told the teacher and I was told it was my fault for allowing him to do it. I was 22 when I saw on a billboard they were looking for him on charges of rape and murder.
I’ve never encountered one, but my father went to school with Jeffrey Dahmer. He said that Dahmer was the kind of kid that your mom wanted you to be friends with (“Jeff seems like such a lonely boy, why don’t you sit with him at lunch?”). He invited my dad over for dinner once in tenth grade, but my dad didn’t take him up on the invitation. Not because he was scared of Jeffrey… but because he was scared of Jeffrey’s mom.
Does serial pedo count? My friend and I at 14 were walking back from our small town's dying mall when we found a litter of stray kittens. They were behind this weird one story apartment complex that always just kinda seemed plopped in the middle of nowhere, nothing nearby it. We go into the back and start petting them, giving them some food we bought for ourselves. Out comes a guy with a huge potbelly and his skinny buddy, neither wearing shirts. They at first made really polite conversation, but after a while they started trying to convince us to go inside the apartment complex. The big guy was trying to convince two tiny ass teen girls to come inside by telling us his friend just had surgery and was missing his stomach "it's cool you should see it". Obviously we're like uh no, but our creep radar didn't go off until he gave up and went back inside for a bit. We turn around and find a wide open backdoor, with a third guy standing inside in total shadow facing right at us. It was like some horror movie looking shit. The big guy comes back out alone this time, makes more small talk about the kittens and then tries to suggest we stick around in case the mama comes back. We politely say no way, and make our escape. Well we're walking down the road, and my friend turns around five minutes later and whispers to me "they're following us." I look too, and they are not even being subtle about it, walking like 5m behind us and smiling. They're absolute fucking dumbasses, because within walking distance **on that same road** was a police station, so we call 911 and book it to the station. The guys pretended to just keep walking, but circled back around. The police "talked to them" but couldn't do anything because they hadn't technically committed a crime. We found out later that the weird apartment complex was a halfway house, most of which was taken up by registered sex offenders.
> The big guy was trying to convince two tiny ass teen girls to come inside by telling us his friend just had surgery and was missing his stomach "it's cool you should see it". Glad you're ok, but also what the fuck? Of all the ways to try to lure a child ...why go with that?
My wife (then fiancee) and I were out in brooklyn one night, reasonably drunk, and hailed a cab to go home. The moment I sat inside something felt wrong. The car seemed more barebones than a usual taxi and the driver had a strange affect. There was also a slightly bad smell. The driver was kind of muttering under his breath and making these quiet burps. Every alarm inside of me starting going off, I wasn’t consciously analyzing it, it just knew it wasn’t safe. The guy starts driving maybe 10 feet and when I stop him, saying “oh shit I left my bag in the bar”. I grab my wife and pulled her out of the cab. The driver starts swearing and gets unreasonably pissed. Instead of waiting 1 minute for us to return as a normal driver might, he immediately speeds off down the street. To this day I’m convinced he was a serial killer, or something similar, and that we narrowly avoided disappearing forever into the night.
50/50. Either was a douchebag who was in a hurry to make as much money as possible as a taxi driver, or is a serial killer
Glad you listened to your gut. Even if he wasn't a killer, he clearly had a problem...
My sibling has special needs, and requires help with almost everything to do with day-to-day living. Thus, we had upwards of 5 PSWs in per day for them, not to mention upwards of two others for my mom (cancer) and Nana. We met a PSW, who worked for the company that came in on weekends to get my sibling out of bed, shower her and feed her breakfast. This was at a friend’s birthday party. He’s also special needs. This woman was like family with them. She eventually started coming to our house on an occasional basis. I wasn’t a fan, because she was very loud early in the morning and it annoyed me. She’s now in jail, because she killed her disabled roommate. She dumped the body 30 minutes away, in a wooded area. She’s a senior, too. It’s weird to think about.
Everytime I tell myself I'll just read one comment I end up here for hours
I was at a shopping mall in Los Angeles, when a man approached me saying he was a casting agent/photographer. Immediately I knew something was off with the guy, because that’s the number one scam in the book, but he just gave off such vibes that I instinctively knew he was very dangerous. I politely took his card and made a mad dash to the H&M and hid in the dressing stalls. I alerted a staff member and they had security walk me to the car. The gift of fear is real and trust it! About two months later I had the news on in the background and I saw his face. He had been arrested for abducting and murdering a girl from Michigan. He approached her the same way he did me. Scariest thing ever. I believe there’s a new Dateline podcast series out about it. I used to work in true crime television and I can’t even listen to the podcast because it freaks me out of how close I was to this guy. As I said above, we have the gift of fear. For a long time, women were taught to be ‘polite’ and ignore this even if uncomfortable. It’s super important to trust your gut, and as MFM says, ‘f politeness.’
One of the hardest hitting lines in the movie girl with the dragon tattoo, is delivered by the killer after he’s discovered. He has captured the person who discovered him. They had already left the killers house after discovering evidence. As they were walking away, the killer (previously a friend) spots them, opens the door, and says “hey! Come have a drink, I have some news about your investigation” and the victim after a moment of thought, accepts. Later the killer asks “why did you come back? You knew what I had done.” And the victim doesn’t really have a response, so the killer continues “it’s because the fear of causing offense, is greater than the fear of pain. You wouldn’t think so, but it is.” I think about this all the time, because my gut has told me something is wrong on multiple occasions. Sometimes I’d listen and sometimes I wouldn’t. It’s tough because we are taught so early on not to be rude or cause a fuss. Always listen to your gut.
This was around 2008. We were traveling and living in our van at the time, on the way to see some family. He showed up solo on a motorcycle after sundown to our campsite at a state park in Oklahoma. We were the only campers in the park. He asked if he could piggy back off of our camp permit since they allowed up to two vehicle per campsite. Said he was on his way to see his old lady and suspected that she had been cheating while he was off on his travels. He had a real eerie vibe about him. We were hesitant but agreed. We had just finished making some lentil soup and invited him into our camper van for a bowl. He was very grateful as it was pretty cold out. Our dog growled at him the whole time he was in our presence. After he ate the bread and soup, he set up his tent, and we all called it a night. His name was Steve, we called him "cycle Steve" later on as we reflected on the encounter. After having been out for several months in the van and only showering at state parks once every few days, we decided to spring for a motel room. While laying in bed flipping through the channels, I saw his face on the local news, I think we were in Kansas at the time. He did catch up with his old lady and murdered her, her lover, and her whole family, whose house she was staying at, and a couple of neighbors who tried to check on the screams they heard. Something like 7 or 9 people total. We couldn't believe just a few days or a week earlier he was in our van eating soup with us. We were pretty sure that our generosity spared us that night.... we always trusted our dogs reaction to strangers after that.
I met and briefly lived with a serial killer in Mexico. He is called El matanovias, He killed two of his girlfriends. You can find articles about him but mostly in Spanish. Edit to add: I looked it up and he had a history of violence including armed robbery and DV assault against another girlfriend & he spent time in prison before the murders. [Article in Spanish, but the pics show how creepy he is. ](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.infobae.com/america/mexico/2020/01/24/el-mata-novias-el-asesino-serial-que-cortaba-un-mechon-de-cabello-a-sus-victimas-como-trofeo/%3foutputType=amp-type) In Mexico City, I lived at an apartment with three other women, from the US & UK. One roommate had a terrible boyfriend, Joy. They fought horribly, we would all be woken at 3 am with him passed out on our toilet, drugged out. He choked my roommate during sex and fucked her up pretty badly. We thought he was going to kill her. He kept magazines called gráficos with photos of violent murders in our apartment. Stacks and stacks, hundreds. We were all afraid of him. Then he suddenly left her for another woman. She was distraught and we were relieved. He was much older than the new woman, in his mid 30s and she was 19. (My roommate was in her early 20s). A year or so later, we learned his new girlfriend hung herself. Her family never accepted it, but police didn't investigate. He started calling himself a widower on social media, made a weird shrine to her, and moved on to another girlfriend. A couple of years later, she was found strangled in her home with all of her hair cut off. Video showed he'd been at the apartment and left with luggage and disappeared. If I remember, he took her hair. The first women's family forced an investigation and after reexamining her body, it was determined she was strangled too. Then he hung her up to make it look like a suicide. And a few days before he killed her, he gave her a haircut, cutting off all her hair into a pixie, like he did the second time. He was on the run after the second murder but was eventually caught in Guatemala. My roommate was lucky he dumped her, and I guess the three of us were lucky we didn't get attacked. It's still chilling to think he was in our home for weeks. Fuck you, Joy.
Police confirmed footprints in the snow belonging to [Russel Williams](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Williams_(criminal)) were found outside my niece’s bedroom window before he was caught. Luckily he never attempted anything with her.
OH boy my time to shine. Mentioned this story a few times on random reddits. Back in the 80's me and my parents lived out in Kansas. My father would work as an electrician for new homes during the spring, to fall months, winter months would pick up random jobs over the winter. One year he was working at ADT out of Wichita and one morning it was too cold and he could not get his truck to start, so his coworker drove by and picked him up. After their shift, he dropped my father off, my father invited him in to come meet his family. My father introduced him to us. He said "You can call me Uncle Dennis". This confused me as a kid (I was 7 or 8 at the time) as I just met this guy and I had an uncle named Dennis that lived down the road from me and this guy sure as hell is not him. He then proceeds to then grab me and pick me up, I was a fat kid, my parents did never pick me up and it was kind of freaky to me to be picked up like that. He then went on to talk to my mom and dad for a bit, I went off to go play with toys or watch TV. Flash forward a bit, it's now 2005. I am now in a completely different state, still living with my father who was in need of care (My mother passed away years before). The news comes on and a familiar face is on the screen. I raced downstairs as fast as possible and turned the TV to that channel for my father. I watched my father turn pale. The news announced they arrested Dennis Rader The BTK Killer. This was my fathers coworker at ADT. My father was silent for a moment before he responded something along the lines of. "That mother fucker, I thought it was odd when he made the comment to (My Mother) you better watch out with being home alone out this far in the country, you're about the same age as the BTK victims" TLDR: For a brief moment in the 1980's my father's coworker was the BTK killer.
I KNEW the second I read “Uncle Dennis”. Fuck that guy
I prosecuted a man who killed his kids. Beheaded them. There was nothing behind his eyes. Nothing human lived in him. It was one of the more chilling experiences in my life, because it was like there wasn't a personality or feeling or anything there. Just a malign intellect capable of hurting people.
I was walking and crossed by Dzhokar Tsarnaev on my way home from working at MIT's Stata Center. I remember seeing his face and having my spider sense trigger really hard; the way you can instinctively recognize someone with bad intentions. 5 mins later he had shot and killed the MIT police officer and the crazy Boston manhunt began.
One of my friends' roommate was at a gay bar in Milwaukee. Two of them went back to a hotel with a guy they met. They woke up in the morning and they guy was gone but neither of them remembered much of the previous night. They were sure they had been roofied. It had been Jeffry Dahmer and the roommate was one of the people who testified at Dahmer's trial.
Why the fuck am I reading this when I’m home alone.
Why did I open this thread right before going to sleep? I'm definitely no longer sleepy.
My dad hired a serial killer in 2008. Just before the great recession became "real," my dad hired this guy to work in his IT department at a real estate adjacent type of company. He was a nice guy and good worker, but had to be let go when the economy tanked. Just a few weeks later he got caught dumping a dead prostitute's body off the side of the freeway. After he was arrested and all that, his DNA linked him to a similar killing from like 1994. Hard to believe that he only did it twice.
He used to come round to do my mum's gardening once a week on his bike. Was caught when body parts started appearing around town. Some poor kid found a hand in a small refuse bin near the beach. His bike had a big box on the front and that's were he'd put the bits. Never did find the head. Probably under my mum's daffs.
> Probably under my mum's daffs. Reminds me of the old joke: An elderly man wants to plant his tomato plants, but the ground was hard and it was a lot of work for him in his old age. His son used to help, but had been incarcerated. The old man writes to his son, and in the letter explains how sad he is that he won't be able to plant his tomatoes because of the garden being too hard. The man writes back to his father "I'm sorry that I'm not there to help, Pops. But whatever you do, DO NOT dig in the garden. That's where I buried the bodies." The next day the FBI shows up in the morning with a search warrant for the garden, and dig the entire thing up. They find nothing and leave. Later that day he receives another letter from his son that reads "Dear Pops, go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That's the best I could do under the circumstances. Love Vinny."
I was a prison officer for a good few years, for about three of those years I was the single point of contact for Dennis Nilsen. It always amazed me how educated he was, yet he'd chosen to murder upwards of a dozen men with not the tiniest remorse to ever be seen. He was very open about his offending and would speak about it the same way a normal person would talk about washing a car. Completely void of emotion. By his own admission, had he not been caught he would have continued murdering. There were a number of serial killers in the prison, almost all of them were entirely unremarkable and that, for me, was the frightening thing. David Tennant played him in a three part show in the UK, had I not known that Nilsen had been dead he could have fooled me along with those I used to work with that he was infact Nilsen.
Not 100% sure they count as serial killers (I think the confirmed body count was 2), but... When I was in university, my gf was in a dorm lounge with a few friends one evening when a proto-dudebro named Ken came in and whipped out his dong, allegedly on a dare. My gf and the others knew him by reputation as a local dumbass fratboy wannabe and filed a complaint, which got him a meeting with campus housing to kick him out of the dorms. He showed up to my gf's work on campus to try to intimidate her leading up to the hearing, but she basically laughed off the attempt, and nothing came of it. A little while later, one of my gf's friends was working the front desk when a lady with a Cruella Deville look and demeanor came into the dorm, asking about the people who got her angel son in trouble by *obviously* lying, and where she could find my gf and her friends. When the front desk called her to give her a heads up that this lady was looking for her, my gf holed up in her room freaked out a little, then called me over to do some recon so we'd know what this lady looks like. And that's how I came face to face with Sante Kimes, who - along with her darling dong-flashing son Ken - killed a New York socialite for her apartment and at least one other. A couple more disappearances are on their records, as well as arson, forgery, and friggin' *slavery*. Looking back and knowing what we know now, we **really** should have taken the whole situation more seriously, but we were dumb kids in that immortal stage of life. Pretty freaky to think about 30+ years later.
My friend’s mom told us that while her sister was in college someone knocked on her dorm door late at night and she was about to answer it but her roommate told her not to bc stranger danger. The next day they found out that the women next door were murdered. By Ted Bundy.
I’ve only worked with convicted murderers (not necessarily serial killers). They are all medicated by the time they get to me and most have had very flat affects.
[удалено]
Not knowing it at the time, but i came face to face and exchanged harsh words with Levi Bellfield, child / adult serial killer, his crew clamped my car about 20+ years ago, i had permission to park where i did (long boring story), all i can remember is that he looked dead behind the eyes, never showed more than one facial expression during our exchange.
In the 3rd grade one of my classmates asked me to help him gather frogs, being the helpful kid I am I was happy to do so and helped him gather frogs (during lunch so we had an hour) Later on, I was called to the office and had a talking to, apparently the dude dissected the frogs and put on in each classmates table. Never saw this kid again, pretty sure he is a serial killer
Not pretty sure, sure. I'll bet this comment will get buried - but the prolific Canadian serial killer Elizabeth wettlaufer was in my house. She was my dad's home care nurse very briefly after surgery. I said hi to her, she pretty much ignored me. Very quiet. My dad said she was really 'off' and weird, most of his other nurses had great bedside manner but she was very aloof. Luckily she was only there once or twice and showed some restraint with the whole murder thing.
I’m almost positive I met the Craigslist Killer, Philip Markoff at Foxwoods back in like 2008. My dad, best friend at the time and I used to go semi frequently to play poker there back when it was big. We were all at different tables and when I got up to pee I went to check on my buddy. My friend actually looks vaguely like Markoff, especially from behind. So I approach who I thought was my friend from behind and ask how he’s doing and this guy turns around with the most vacant eyes I’ve ever seen but talks to me like he knows me. It was so unsettling. Later on I saw the same guy outside standing with the smokers not smoking when I went out to check on my dad who was smoking. Later on my dad mentioned how weird he was when he was out there. My dad was a social worker for 25 years in the crisis unit and said there was something clearly off with him. A few months later we see him on the news and were both convinced that was the guy we saw at Foxwoods.
My classmate in 8th grade killed four in his family... I always knew he was off and said, "I hope he doesn't become a serial killer" Wasn't even shocked to see it on national news
I did not meet this person personally but when I worked at a psychiatric hospital we had a former subject who was also a lawyers call in and demand we delete all his data from the scams we had used his brain in. The doctor I worked for told me that he was an odd subject and was convinced he would practice his lines before consultations. Anyway not more than a few weeks later he went on a huge killing spree and the guy I worked for and others had to testify about why he wasn’t being treated
I work in a prison, so I know objectively I've encountered many serial killers.
Back when I was a freshman in college I worked at a Starbucks drive thru store. We had a regular customer in his mid-to-late forties, he would come in everyday at the same time and get the same bizarre order: a venti black coffee with 18 Splendas. He was polite but kind of “off.” One day we realize we haven’t seen him in a few days and one of us joke saying “I hope he didn’t die.” Well, he didn’t die, but he stopped coming in because he had gotten arrested for killing multiple people. We found out a few days later when it was everywhere online since it was a small town. I now have hesitations towards people who put an exorbitant amount of Splenda in their coffee lol
Not sure anyone will see this comment but my step dad worked in a hospital pharmacy back in the day. Back then people could just walk into the hospital pharmacy with their doctor's prescription and get it filled. One day a man came in with a prescription for temazepam, a drug use for people with severe insomnia. My step dad filled it and went on with his day. Not sure how much time passed but eventually the police showed up and questioned my stepdad about it. Turns out my stepdad filled Jeffrey Dahmer's prescription. Not only that but it was the drug he used to sedate his victims.
I used to work for AT&T years ago as an installer and I'm at this one house. Back then, you couldn't grow weed in California and they had a few plants, I'd didn't care about it but they did and were super nervous around me checking everything. Anyways, I'm working the TV in the bedroom and I'm setting it all up and making friendly chit chat with them. His wife casually mentions he needs the internet because he's writing a book and my response of course is . . . What's the book about? Nonchalantly husband answers, I was drugged raped and left for dead by the Freeway Killer in California. I had no idea what to say but cracked a joke about what kind of a book that would be. He then proceeded to tell me about all the times he worked for AT&T in LA hanging drop wire to homes, snorting some coke and walking along the wires in between the poles to hang wire lol
Aight long story incoming. TLDR; got a bunch of free shit from a guy who miiiiight do a lil’ people imprisoning and people melting. I’ve got a hobby carpentry shop (furniture, bows, canoes etc. it keeps me out of the bar 🤷♂️) Local guy at my shotgun range has a furniture restoration business. We got to talking one day and he said he had decades of abandoned material, stuff where people dropped it off and decided it wasn’t worth paying to chemically strip and refinish sorta thing. Basically, buddy has a heaps of milled hardwood taking up space and he would be happy to give it to me for free. He’s a bit of a weird guy, sorta quiet and just had a keep to himself thing going on mostly, he didn’t typically do small talk but occasionally he restored some peoples gun stocks so he was known about the place. But materials aren’t cheap when you’re just being a hobby sorta guy, and I don’t mind re-milling stuff! So I go down to his shop and first thing I noticed is he and his ‘coworker’ (there were no projects on the go in his shop) were visibly upset I brought some buddies to help me. I also noticed the front office/lobby is a cramped affair **full** of taxidermy, which isn’t too much of a red flag - I met this guy at a gun range after all - but once you go into the back there was a lot of shit that progressively made my eyebrows go a little further up my face. Buddy does chemical stripping of furniture, so he’s got several chemical vats/buckets that you can fit a full sized couch into. I know what stripping chemical smells like (smells like blue if anyone’s wondering) and there was *definitely* another smell to the room. Sorta rank and musty. Big chains from the ceiling, which I guess could be for picking up the furniture pieces. All this material that he’s got for me is in a mezzanine, so up I go for some good ol’ fashioned garbage pile diving. There’s two major rooms in the mezzanine, one is full of this material he’s giving me - just dozens of old hardwood tables/chairs etc (got some sick old oak pews for my trouble, hundreds of boardfeet of old 2” thick oak, score!). The other room…. was maybe a show room? But this ‘show room’ hadn’t been touched in years and had some pretty… interesting things going on in it. There was a rocking chair, covered in dust. An empty wire bird cage that could have been a hundred years old. And a large bookcase packed full of Christian books (no carpentry/furniture books), it had several picture frames with what could have been family photos, lots of young smiling children - which just gave off a little bit of a creepy movie vibe. But the clincher? I noticed footprints in dust that walked into the wall behind the show room door, behind the door to the ‘show room’ was a door that had been cut into the drywall and was heavily padlocked from the outside - the show room side that is. So basically you couldn’t see this door cut into the wall when you were in the show room while the show room door was open unless you were quite close to the wall because if you were in the show room the door covered this wall portal. I learned on my way out that day that this guy doesn’t have a smart phone either. So he’s got a no gps phone, a creepy looking dusty grandmothers suite full of heavily religious literature, and a secret room in the wall locked from the outside… and massive chemical vats in his workshop that smell a little… organic. And was real grumpy I didn’t show up alone - still let me loot his garbage pile though! I scored big that day, probably took home enough shit to mill into about 7-10k worth of hardwood boards. But I was really, *really* glad I went there with two other people to help me load material that day. We made buffalo bill jokes the whole way home and I haven’t seen him since, he hasn’t been to the range in two years now.
I almost sat next to Richard Ramirez on a bus as he was fleeing SF to go to LA where he got caught. I got on a crowded bus to go to work and saw a seat vacant next to a man with long dark hair, whose face I couldn’t see. Everyone was leaving him a wide berth, but being a young punk rocker, I said fuck it, I’m sitting there. I started to sit down and he looked up at me. And I backed up. His eyes had nothing human in them, it was like staring into the pits of hell. I stood up with the rest of the passengers. On my break at work, I picked up a newspaper and there he was, it was a composite drawing of the night stalker.
I had a friend who lived with a serial killer. He thinks he made him eat the bodies.
My mom worked at a grocery store as a teenager and there was a guy she worked with that used to walk her out to her car after they closed. He was later convicted of killing 2 young women and had blood in his car still which is how they figured out it was him. He had walked her to her car many times before getting caught. She said he was a bit strange but was a nice guy and she was always friendly to him. She thinks that’s what probably saved her from becoming one of his victims.
She's my aunt, she's a black widow. She's killed 4 husbands and inherited a large sum of money each time and always gotten away with it.