Every day we interact with dozens of people- friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, and even just passersby. These are the stories of twenty one people whose ordinary encounters had a malicious undertone.
The Good Citizen Killer
“Willie Pickton ran a fundraiser BBQ for a Scout Troop I was a part of. He brought all the pork and everything which we served up.
Funny enough though, I had food poisoning the day earlier and wasn’t feeling well still so I didn’t have anything at the BBQ. Good thing too, because some time later people found out the guy fed his murder victims to his pigs.
Found out because dude got busted and his face was everywhere for a solid 5 years”
The Angry Tutor
“One of my tutors at university seemed to have a very short temper.
First tutorial session was OK, but he spent five minutes telling us how importance attending his tutorials was (tutorials are kind of viewed as optional, as they’re to go over stuff covered in the lectures).
Second tutorial, a few people didn’t show up, and he spent fifteen minutes ranting about their absence. Third tutorial, even more people didn’t turn up, and he spent even longer ranting about it. After that, my friends and I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. Apparently he ranted about the absentees even more at the next tutorial, and I’m not sure if anyone managed to stick out the whole term of tutorials.
He’d also help out in lab sessions and various other course-related activities, but everyone found him slightly uncomfortable to deal with.
After the exams, we had a bit of a party at someone’s house to celebrate. A casual invite was extended to the lecturers, tutors and assistants who’d been involved in getting us through the year. He turned up (none of the other teaching staff did) and although not entirely welcome, hung around for a while. When things were winding down, I headed off, but when I spoke to the host of the party the next day, it turned out that Mr Angry Tutor had ended up crashing on the living room floor with a load of the others (except they’d all arranged in advance to stay over), but had headed off about half six in the morning. We commented on how odd it/he was, but didn’t give it much more thought…
…until a few months later, when he was arrested for a violent murder involving dismemberment. He turned out to have a history of violence, and a lot of predatory and stalker-ish behaviours.
None of that “he was a quiet man, kept himself to himself” business – he had obvious anger issues and made people uncomfortable, and it didn’t come as a complete surprise to find out how twisted he was”
Henry Lee Lucas
“OK, so this is weird, but my mom ran into Henry Lee Lucas years ago. She was a social worker in a super rural place, and she used to pick up candy for her kids (clients) before meeting with them. She worked with kids with disabilities, and getting them services, and she would often stock up on candy, because the families were pretty poor and didn’t get sweets often. She would get enough for all the kids to get a piece. So she had a lot of candy in her cart!
This guy was talking to her, and was super nice and talkative, and was asking about the candy. She told him what it is was for, and being super friendly herself, kept the conversation going. He told her he wished he had someone like her around when he was a kid, and laughed.
She looked at his face, and she says she can’t explain it, but it just changed. Like it was something else for a minute and then went back to his regular face. She suddenly got this super nauseous feeling, and started feeling just generally terrible. She started being kind of short with him, and they parted ways.
She told my dad about it, and said she didn’t know what was wrong with her, and how she might be losing her mind. A few months later, he pops up on screen for some reason or another. She freaked out and told my dad it was him.
My mom is not into making things up, or fantastic attention seeking behavior. My dad certainly is not into that either. So it was a weird situation, and they both claim it happened to this day. I know it sounds out there, but I always figured maybe it was some supernatural thing? OR maybe she subconsciously caught on to something weird going on that she couldn’t quite process, and it came out this way instead? Like, you know people talk about having bad feelings and attribute it to something telling them something is off? Some people speculate that many times we catch on to things on some level, like some animal level, that we can’t totally process in our conscious mind, so it comes out in ways like “hair standing up” or “skin crawling.” So who knows if it was some unseen force, or simply her lizard brain picking up on something being “off” and that was the way her mind chose to process it? Whatever it was though, she swears up and down it happened, and since she has never made things up or acted hysterical before, I believe something happened for sure”
The Deadly Young Neighbor
“I went to school with and lived in the same apartment complex as a guy who killed and then raped (not sure if that’s the right word) his mother’s dead body. This was all because she wouldn’t give him money.
How did he get caught? Well, he was waiting for his sister to get home so he could kill her too, but got “bored” and rode his bike to a town that’s about a 30 minute drive away. He went up to someone’s door and confessed because he was ‘tired of running.’
About a week before he did this my mom yelled at him for letting his dog poop in our front lawn area and not cleaning it up”
James Holmes
“Not technically a serial killer but a mass murderer. James Holmes did a presentation at my middle school to teach us about the brain and nervous system. He seemed really smart and he joked around really well with all of us. He was the guy that let us hold a preserved brain, if that makes sense lol.
Yeah, would have never known there was anything wrong with him but I only interacted with him briefly”
He Was Such a Nice Boy
“Not a serial killer, but I was neighbors with Charles “Andy” Williams; a school shooter. I knew him when he lived in Maryland before he moved to California where he eventually shot and killed 2 and wounded 13 others.
He was a country kid at heart and very soft spoken. First time I met him he rang my doorbell one night asking if him and his friends could go sledding in my backyard. My parents allowed them to do so and also let my sisters and I to go out with them. He was always very nice and polite so when my family found out he was actually the school shooter we were shocked and confused on how a nice guy like Andy could do such a thing”
On The Cover of The Rolling Stone
“My great grandmother used to have a Henry Lee Lucas story.
The story went that she was out driving somewhere and she saw a guy hitchhiking. It was different times back then (I’m not sure when this took place) and she gave the fellow a lift. She said that he wrote his name down on a piece of paper and told her to, “keep a look out for his name in the paper”.
Sure enough she see’s it a few months later.
I’m not sure how truthful this story was – she never really lied to me (but i never saw her often), but my family is filled with liars, so I wouldn’t be surprised either way”
Ted Bundy
“So this is third hand, but an old boss went to the University of Utah and was in a sorority. One day she was waiting for her date in front of her sorority house with a girlfriend who was also waiting for her date. Her girlfriend’s date pulls up, but her girlfriend forgets something and runs back in the house. My former boss chatted to the man for a few minutes, she noted that he was polite and handsome. Her girlfriend comes out and they leave in his VW beetle, my former boss gets picked up by her date a short while later, and she thinks nothing of it. The next day she sees her girlfriend and asks how the date was. The girlfriend says that they started driving in her date’s VW Beetle and all of a sudden she got a splitting headache. She thought it was really strange but she felt nauseous. She apologized and asked him to take her home. He was a little upset but he dropped her back off. They didn’t go out again. Years pass, and my former boss is watching the news one night and sees a familiar man on the screen. It was Ted Bundy”
The Carnies
“This was the early 80s. I was about 13 and just getting into Dungeons and Dragons and other interests that would stunt my social life for years to come. A renaissance fair rolled into town and billed a “real unicorn” as one of its attractions. I was disappointed to find the unicorn was a poor goat with a cow horn grafted to its forehead.
The goats owners were a trio of hippies, two women and a balding white guy with a beard. I remember getting a sinister vibe off the guy.
Decades later, I’m reading an article about Charles Ng and Leonard Lake, partners in serial killing.
Turns out, Lake used to run a goat-unicorn hustle at renaissance fairs. Guess a guy who tortured and killed up to 25 people had no problem mutilating a goat”
Richard Ramirez
“When my mom was 16 she was sleeping and woke up to someone trying to open her bedroom window. She ran to my grandma’s room and told her someone was trying to break in. My grandma ( being the crazy awesome lady she is ) grabs a bat and runs outside and confronts this guy and starts swinging. The guy runs off and they don’t think too much of it. Some time later my Grandma sees the guy on the news and it’s Richard Ramirez. My mom told this story over and over when I was growing up. She easily could have been one of his victims, I’m so grateful she wasn’t especially since she was pregnant with me at the time”
The Jihadist
“I will not reveal too much information, due to the sensitive nature of this topic.
I am a U.S. citizen who lived and studied abroad in Egypt during the late 2000s.
I attended a large international school there. Many of the local Egyptian students were quite wealthy and came from very affluent families.
There were several similar schools around Cairo, and it wasn’t uncommon for large numbers of students to go out for nights on the town together, mixing and mingling with students from other schools.
One evening, I found myself downtown at a fancy restaurant with a very large group of strangers. There must have been at least 30 of us crowded around a long row of tables.
For whatever reason, the topic of bodybuilding eventually came up.
I was quite scrawny at the time (still am, to some extent), and asked if anyone had some tips for working out at Egyptian gyms. The guy seated across from me said that he would go get his friend, who was a devout body builder.
Met the guy and we shook hands. He seemed nice enough, if not a bit dense. Talked a lot like Sylvester Stallone. Fancy smartphone, nice clothes, fresh haircut. A “bro”, if you will. Gave me a few tips and went on his way. I remembered his face and name, but not much else.
The next time I saw him was several years later, in international newspapers. I recognized not only his face and name, but most of the articles mentioned his passion for bodybuilding.
His style had changed completely.
That man had become one of the most brutal and feared terrorists working with ISIS, having personally tortured and beheaded hundreds of individuals, later posting the pictures online and bragging about it.
Thankfully, it is believed that he eventually blew himself up after leaving a goodbye letter to his family.
I was stunned. The guy seemed perfectly normal when I had met him, which makes it even more chilling. How did he end up the way he did? I’ll never know”
Frank Walls
“I grew up in Fort Walton Beach Florida and in the early 1980’s my friend and I would bike to the Jr. Food Store (convenience store) to play Galaga every chance we could. There was a weird guy that would come harass us who was about 2 or 3 years older than us (we were 11 or 12). My friend liked to get in to fights so he started calling him “Chahlee” to fluster him. The dude had a huge knife in his boot every time we saw him, so I decided to just ignore him. That was pretty much how it went for the entire summer and he’d even play Galaga with us occasionally. It turns out, the guy was Frank Walls“
Quiet But Deadly
“Went in the same class as this girl. She was rather quiet, but not weird or anything that stood out. One night she and her then boyfriend walked in to her sister’s room and went berserk on the sister with a hammer while she was asleep. Then they proceeded in to her parent’s room, them too asleep. They started with the mother, smashing her head, and then the father.
When they were done, they walked to the bus station, sat down and waited for the next buss to take them to the boyfriend’s home in another city. And there’s where the police found them, at the bus station waiting for the bus.
Turns out her sister was still alive when they left her to go and kill the parents and by an act of unimaginable willpower and determination, the sister, beaten close to death with a hammer, managed to get out of the villa and over to the neighbour who called the police.
The motive for the act was money. Her father ran a business and by killing the family she would end up with all the money herself. Thing is, the parents had set up an account for each daughter with an substantial amount of money for their 18th birthday. So if she had only waited a few months she would have gotten a lot of money.
Miraculously, the father survived the beating but the mother died. The sister committing the crime is locked in at a psychiatric facility”
The Dog Whisperer
Source __
“Never met one but my great aunt was the original owner of the dog that David Berkowitz said talked to him”
The Serial Killer’s Brother
“About 10 years ago, I met a guy named Randy Hausner. He was a local comic and small time promoter in Phoenix. He had a comedy night where my then girlfriend was performing. Went to a couple shows…seemed like a nice enough guy. If I remember correctly, he was an advocate for “clean” comedy. If you worked blue, you didn’t work for him.
A couple years later his brother Dale turned out to be the “Serial Shooter,” responsible for 8 murders and at least 29 other shootings in the Phoenix area between 2005 and 2006. He died a few months ago while awaiting execution. Another brother, Jeff, is serving 18 years for stabbing a guy.
Randy actually cracked a joke about it back in 2007:
“So, um, my brother sits accused of being the most prolific serial killer in Arizona history. I feel the Hausner name is now tarnished. So, I’ve decided to change my last name to something less offensive. From now on, call me Randy Manson”
That’s Not My Cousin!
“My friend and I carpool to and from work together everyday. It was late at night and I was waiting for her to come pick me up when her cousin drove past and told me she was running late, and had asked if he could come pick me up, so I wouldn’t have to wait so long alone.
I met her cousin only once, very briefly at a wedding she had dragged me to a few months back. He seemed nice, then and now, so I agreed.
I was about to step into the car, but then I realized I had left my purse inside my work. I told him I would be 2 seconds to go grab it. I went back into work and grabbed my purse. My phone rang. It was my friend. She said she was on her way to come pick me up. Confused, I reminded her that she had asked her cousin to pick me up. Silence. She only has one cousin, and he was on a missionary trip in another country…WTF.
Turns out, this guy had been stalking every detail of my life and schedule, and knew I waited for my friend every night to pick me up. He dressed up as my friends “cousin” because he knew I wouldn’t be afraid of him because I had met him, but I didn’t know him well enough to realize it wasn’t him.
The cops, after a long chase, caught him. He had previously murdered 3 other women, and in the back of his car were poisons, guns, chains, knives, ropes, and masks.
DODGED THAT F—–G BULLET”
Kendall Francois
“While growing up in Poughkeepsie, NY when I was 12-14 years old, one of my brother’s friends became very close with our family. He called my mother mom, and was considered one of the family. He even took one of my sisters out to a movie date at one point.
Coming home from work one night my brother told my mom that the cops showed up where he and Nate worked and arrested Nate. It turned out that Nate was stalking and murdering girls between the ages of 14-20 in Dutchess and Orange Counties and had already killed 6, strangling and bludgeoning them and disposing of the bodies on the side of the road. Nathaniel White was his name.
If that wasn’t bad enough, fast forward about 6 years and 2 blocks from my house, they arrested Kendall Francois and located 8 dead women in his home – which he shared with his mom, dad and 14 year old sister. Apparently although the place reeked of decomposing bodies none of the other people in the house where even remotely aware of the corpses”
Cary Stayner
“He had already committed the murders at this point, but Cary Stayner tried to rent my neighbor’s house. Me (12 at the time) and my 17 year old sister would’ve probably been prime candidates for his next victims. He was found at the nudist colony down the street”
Killer Classmate
“A classmate killed his stepfather by nearly decapitating him while sleeping on the family’s couch. The only sign was the kid coming into school late, angry and at times crying. Shortly before the incident the mother had recently bought my classmate an expensive car and the stepfather took it away as punishment. There apparently had been some tension brewing up with them at home (including allegations of molestation and neo-nazism). But really kindergarten through high school there were no other signs than the classmate coming in upset and late for our class and not really participating. Which by all means isn’t that much of a sign something gruesome was about to happen”
Jeffrey Dahmer
“My buddy’s dad was roommates with Jeffrey Dahmer at Ohio State. According to him he didn’t last more than a quarter and would just roam around late at night while everyone was sleeping and microwaved weird foods and generally weirded everyone out and holy shit I might also be a serial killer”
The Serial Killer Next Door
“A serial killer lived in the street behind my aunt’s house. Us kids went to a party next door to his house. We’d all seen the guy. Seemed like a harmless old man. A bit scary but harmless.
Then the police dug up his patio and found the bodies of two young women buried underneath. He’d also killed some women up north. That was an odd time”