A collection of personal anecdotes from individuals who unexpectedly crossed paths with people later convicted of murder. These stories offer chilling insights into the lives of both the killers and those who knew them, highlighting the unsettling nature of these encounters.
"Fast forward a few years, and I am working in Manhattan, and I literally bump right into him on the subway platform. Apparently, he got out after a few years. It was seriously the most awkward small talk I ever had with someone in my life.
" "Ted Bundy dated my aunt. I grew up in Kirkland, Washington, just outside Seattle. My aunt lived in Ballard at the time. They dated for a few months, and it just sort of fell apart. She said that he was one of the most polite, nicest people that she had ever met. Freaky as fuck."in college. He was one year ahead of me, but in the same major. I remember taking classes with him. So, our paths crossed often. I remember him being super paranoid. He threw a fit in our lab, telling our TA he wouldn't fill out a required form. He finally did, but added a disclaimer at the bottom. It was bizarre. I think that was around 2008–2009; he was already unraveling then." "I remember when I found out about Aurora, I was working when my old college roommate texted me asking if I had heard about the shooting in Colorado, followed shortly by her texting me who did it. My roommate remembered him clearly from a GE class we both took with him. I remember feeling scared, for some reason, when I put a name to a face. My teeth started chattering wildly. I was shocked. It still freaks me out to this day, remembering working in labs and having class discussions with that guy. We were definitely not friends but, I probably saw him nearly every day for at least a couple years. I can still see him working across from me under a fume hood in my mind's eye anytime his name is brought up." "In 7th grade, there was a boy that sat behind me who was emotionally off. Sometimes he was okay, but at other times he was quiet and enraged. I had always been super kind to him, and because of that, he was always nice back. Once, I made a joke to him as I picked up my pencil that I dropped, and didn't realize he was in one of his moods. He stood up and punched me in the face. I was shocked because I thought he was my friend. We were both suspended. He wouldn't speak to the school officials, and I explained what happened. Two years later, he stabbed his cousin with a screwdriver and killed him for no reason.""I knew two murderers, actually. I was in drama club in high school with this really nice, straight-laced, honor student guy who was a grade ahead of me. He got his younger brother, who was a year behind me, into the program. The younger brother was handsome and charming, but a bit of a slacker. They’d both been to my home and met my mother. About six years after high school, I’d moved from the East Coast to the West. My mom called and asked me for his younger brother’s name. Turned out he’d been involved in robbing a mom-and-pop store in my old neighborhood and violently killing the wife. Last I heard, he was still serving a life sentence." "The other one was even creepier. I met 'Dan' when he worked at a local bookstore. This was the summer after my freshman year of high school; he was 17 and had just graduated. He wanted to go out with me, but I wasn’t allowed on night dates yet, so he asked my mother if he could take me to the beach one day. Surprisingly, she agreed. When we got to the car, he asked me to get cigarettes from the glove compartment. Also, there was a handgun, which freaked me out a little. I only saw him one other time. He was in the hospital for a dental procedure and asked me to visit with a pack of cigarettes . I knocked and walked in to his mother, yelling at him over something, and she was also pretty snarky to me. Fast forward four years: Dan’s mother has been murdered in bed, and his father is clinging to life in a hospital. Two days later, Dan was shot dead in the hospital parking lot by a cousin who had figured out that Dan had shot his parents. The police went to the family home and found the murder weapon under some floorboards. Yep, it was a handgun. I always assumed that it was the one in the glove box.""Twenty years ago, my ex-boyfriend killed someone in self-defense, as indicated by a statement the victim made to the off-duty officer who responded to the incident. The shooting was a result of jealousy and a case of mistaken identity. He got five years in prison with one year credit time served.""I found when I was like 13 that both my grandfather and uncle had been killers. I never met either of them. They were both on my dad's side of the family. My grandfather basically beat a woman to death, and they described it as him giving her a hysterectomy with his bare hands." "My uncle killed two people. The first one, he stabbed a guy like 80 times, slit his throat ear to ear, and then cut him from balls to throat. He wrote on the walls with the guy's blood, kinda Charles Manson-like. The second person was a woman he met at the bar. He stabbed her around 70 times and dismembered her. I guess the big reason why both went off the deep end and killed somebody is that they got extremely wasted and got very angry for whatever reason. At least that's what I was told." "I had a friend who went to the same Catholic grade school in a tiny town outside of Pittsburgh, and we each lived in a tinier town near there. She was one of my two best friends, and we hung out as much as our parents would allow. She was sweet and quiet, and I was gregarious, bringing her out of her shell. My mom hated bringing me to Jenny's house because it was a bit of a hike, and her mom always called to come get me after an hour, and it was a waste of her time. She was a strange lady, but as a kid, I wasn't judgmental." "Cut to 10 years later — I'm in the ER for a concussion, and I see on the TV that Jenny's mom had just been arrested — for Jenny's murder! She had stabbed her to death in the woods behind a school for being 'addicted to weed.' I hadn't seen her in years, but it was a gut punch. I'm glad I didn't spend more time there — I love weed.""Two kids I went to high school with murdered one of their girlfriends' mothers. They beat her to death with a baseball bat and then stabbed her . Then put her body in a wood bin. Then, the three of them, the two kids I know and the girlfriend, started driving from North Carolina back to Connecticut to murder everyone they had on a list they made. They made it up to the town next to ours before they got caught. Both flipped on their girlfriends during the trial and were sentenced to 33 1/3 years. This was back in 2000, so they're getting out relatively soon.""I knew a kid in Boy Scouts who moved to a different town and beat an unhoused man to death. I wasn't terribly surprised; I'd heard stories about him killing kittens when we were younger.""My sister's ex-boyfriend is in jail currently for killing the girl he dated after her and putting her body into a cement-sealed barrel. It's so awful for that girl and her family, but all I could think of is what a revenge mission I would be on if it had happened to my sister. It still keeps me up at night." "This year, a coworker sent me a news post about a murder. The news mentioned a guy with a name I didn't really recognize, but it said that he was two years older than me, and graduated from the same college in the same major. I look up the name on Facebook, and I immediately recognize him. I had a couple of classes with him, and he was the president of my major's student association." "He killed his girlfriend, stayed inside the house with the body for three days, and then killed himself with a plastic bag. It surprisingly affected me more than I expected, since I barely even knew the guy. I felt sick the whole day.""I went to school with a popular guy, on the pro athlete team, but he always kept to himself; he seemed to only interact with others when he was playing with his teammates. But he wasn't awkwardly quiet or anything, he said hey/smiled at others, cool content guy. But then, he was on the news for killing his girlfriend, his girlfriend's mom, and his little sister. The police found him walking down the street with blood all over him. It just seems weird because you know this person, and it makes you wonder what made them react to that extent." "When I was in high school, one of my friends murdered his family, kind of out of nowhere. The day it happened, it started to get around among my friends that something had gone down at his house. This was before most people had cell phones, and texting wasn't a thing at all. Throughout the day, more and more people were contacted and headed to the guy's house. The first officers on scene got his name and his brother's name mixed up, and we were all told that his brother had snapped and shot their parents and then him, then called the police and gave himself up with no struggle. We all got together and mourned, and went to school the next day." "Shortly into the first hour of classes, everyone who was a known friend of Andy's was pulled out of class and called into the office. Once we were all there, the principal told us that Andy was alive and that he had actually been the one who committed the murders. Everyone was pretty shocked. This dude was a totally harmless stoner who never even really seemed to disagree with anyone, much less have violent tendencies. The funeral was really rough; they had an open casket viewing even though his parents were both shot in the face. Andy claims to have no memory of doing it, and what they've pieced together is that he, for whatever reason, went into his dad's gun locker, pulled out a rifle, and shot his parents in their kitchen. It didn't look like there was any kind of struggle. His brother came up from their basement, and he shot him at the top of the stairs. He then called the police and told the dispatcher that his parents were dead, and when she asked who killed them, he said he had. He went outside and stood on the lawn waiting for the police to come. Once they got there, he went into a full-on panic, asking about his brother; he had no idea that he'd shot him. He got 18 years for each murder, I think, and was sent to prison. I wrote to him here and there at first, but his replies felt really strange to me. I feel a little bit guilty now about fading out of his life, but it was honestly really, really hard to reconcile the person I was friends with with the person I was writing to, the person who killed his family. He sounded very stiff and hollow in the replies. I guess that makes some sense. I keep up with the details now through a friend who still keeps in touch with him. He tried to escape a few years ago, the guy he was trying to escape with was killed in the process, and his sentence was upped to life.""When I was in middle school, I went to school with a kid whose older brother murdered his parents with a hatchet and sliced up his siblings. It was horrifying. His sister was in my class; she survived...barely. She moved away afterward. The parents died in the attack... she, her older brother, and the 6-year-old boy survived. The youngest left the house while the boy was killing the rest of his family and wandered the street with hatchet marks on his body and face. Eventually, he walked up to a neighbor's house, and they called the cops for him. The boy who killed his family attempted to run away through the open sewers away from his house, from the cops. He escaped for a few hours but was eventually captured." "It was really strange afterward. The front glass door had small bloody handprints on it from where the littlest one had tried to escape, and two of the front windows had blood on them. The girl I went to school with spent a long time in the ICU. I walked by their house often on my way to my best friend's, and there was caution tape around it for months. Then the tape fell, and no one did anything. I remember thinking that there seemed to be no justice for the family and that lives were so fragile. After I found out, I cried pretty hard. I couldn't understand what had happened to my friend and her family. I never saw that girl again, but I hope that she is doing okay." "I got drunk with a friend who's from Honduras. By drunk, I mean beyond fucked up. He told me that he once was offered $30k to kill a guy he didn't know and had no problems with, and he took it. Helped his mom pay off the car/bills, and he was able to buy a car for himself. He said he walked up on a guy, blasted him, and didn't feel anything, no remorse, nothing. He just added that if he didn't do it, someone else would, and his family would still be struggling. I'm pretty sure he used to be in a gang in Honduras, and it probably wasn't the first time he killed.""My father was a murderer. He killed my grandparents, his mom and dad, and as a side effect, his grandmother as well. It will haunt me the rest of my life, and it had a profound effect on the way I grew up. My family hid it from me, saying he had just done some bad stuff. I thought it was drugs or that sort of thing. I loved my dad. We used to watch"Well, naturally, in this day and age, you can't keep a secret like that from a long-inquisitive child with the power of the internet at their fingertips. So here's the story. He was under his parents' bed waiting to grab my grandpa's wallet to steal some money. Well, he got caught, my grandpa pulled out his gun cause he didn't know who it was. They fought over it. He shot my grandpa in the chest and strangled my grandmother with a lamp cord. Afterward, he turned the gas on the stove and walked out. Have you ever seen the movies where the pilot light turns on, and everything is incinerated? That's what happened to the house. My great-grandma was still in the house. She used to have a room full of stuffed animals, which burned up, and all the toxins they released caused her to have chemical burns on her body and lungs. Let's just say I no longer find fluffy teddy bears adorable after seeing what happened to her. Here's a kicker: my sister and I were supposed to be at their house that night. I think what's worse is that because of what he did, my sister and I were declared to be the 'spawn of the devil.' Our family shunned us; they took everything we were supposed to inherit. I can't tell you how much trouble I got into as a kid. This event left me with no emotion other than anger. For years, that's all I could feel or relate to. All I can say is that revenge is never the answer. I watched him die. The state executed him for his crimes. It did not settle anything for me; it didn't make everything better. I watched this man take his last breath, and all I could think about was how I wished that none of this had happened. I wished we could have watched "It didn't really affect my life too much. I was definitely shocked, though. He was a quiet but very nice guy. A bit socially awkward, but never gave the sociopath vibe. He stabbed a girl to death, stabbed himself, and slit his throat. He then claimed that they got robbed. The most accepted reasoning among friends is that he confessed his lifelong love for her, and she didn't react as he expected.""The summer after I was a sophomore in high school, the boy who sat next to me in my honors English class ended up stabbing a boy to death. I think it would've been 2009 or 2010? I was really shaken up for a while, and at first I thought people were playing some sort of sick joke when the news started spreading. I mean, that kid was my partner on projects and stuff. He was kind of quiet but seemed otherwise normal." "Turned out he had hidden behind some bushes and decided to kill the next person who came around on the trail, who happened to be a kid trailing behind his parents on the path. Attacked the boy, then walked up to some construction workers, covered in blood, and turned himself in immediately after. Really fucked up. His mom was a teacher at my school, too." Lastly,"I had a friend in the army, one of the closest ones I made. We started basic training together on the same day, in the same camp and platoon. His bunk was five feet away from mine. After we graduated from basic training, we were both shipped to the same active-duty unit. Same company again, but different platoons this time. He eventually got moved while I handled route clearance, but we still lived on the same FOB and stayed close. He re-enlisted after his initial contract, and I decided to get out and just do the reserves. He got stationed in Korea, where we still talked occasionally, but not like we used to. Finally, he switched duty stations one more time, and we had talked a little bit, but he had a family, and I had my own life. Come to find out one day that he was arrested for shooting someone to death at a party." "Apparently, he went to the party, got into an argument with the host, walked back to his house to get his pistol, and came back and shot the guy in the chest. It was wild. I've never seen him be violent in his life. I used to hang out with his family and play with his kids. Never would've expected it."Did you ever know a real-life murderer? When did you think something was off? Tell us in the comments below, or if you prefer to remain anonymous, submit your story in this form here.
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