Reddit user 7deadlycinderella asked the community, “What was the crime that rocked the community you grew up in?”
Unfortunately people had many stories to tell, which seemed to scar them for life.
So, here are some disturbing true crime stories that actually happened in communities around the world:
Note: Some submissions are from BuzzFeed Community users.
Note: This post contains subjects of violence, domestic abuse, gun violence, grooming, and drugs. Please proceed with caution.
1.“In 2016, an 18-year-old girl (who, as a child, I played with along with my sisters, cousins, and neighbors) had gone missing. Really, without a trace. She was last seen leaving a gas station and that’s the last anyone had heard from her or seen her. When her disappearance was first made public, it was all anyone could talk about. When I first saw her photo, I immediately went back to those days when we were all around the ages of seven to 10, just playing and having fun. For three and half years, there were very few updates, and her family did their damnedest to keep hope and continue on their own search when it felt like the police weren’t doing enough. In July of 2022, a man was charged in connection with her disappearance. This same man was questioned back in 2016 after her disappearance because she was seen going into a house that he was living in at the time, but nothing else came of that initial meeting…”
“Fast forward to when the charges came. How they came to charge him was through a phone call he had made while locked up for a drug charge in November of 2016, just a month after her disappearance.
In these phone calls, he had made MULTIPLE statements about how the police wouldn’t ‘find that girl’ and even threatened another woman by saying that the police ‘wouldn’t find a body.’ And if she didn’t ‘keep her mouth shut,’ she would ‘end up like her.’
Several documents also revealed witnesses talking about noises coming from his house that indicated someone was being harmed.”
2.“Two years after I graduated high school, they found a girl’s body at the wildlife preserve near my house. She had been stabbed in the back and set on fire. It turned out two guys I’d gone to school with (one I’d known since kindergarten) had picked her up, driven her there, stabbed her, and then burned her while she was still alive. It was horrific, but sadly unsurprising that it was them who did it. I’d known that one guy for years — he was always violent and creepy.”
3.“There was a young guy (I believe 19 or 20 years old) who worked the overnight shift at a local grocery store in my hometown. He ended up coming in with a gun and shooting most of his coworkers one night. It turns out he was pretty disturbed; he had an obsession with a certain cartoon and made online videos with some pretty violent details, had a whole online persona, and had been planning the shooting for a while. I worked an overnight front desk shift at a hotel just down the road from the store and watched the news coverage the last couple hours of my shift.”
“I remember driving past the store going home at around 7 a.m. and the place was packed with police cars. It was just a very eery and sad feeling, and I didn’t even know any of the victims personally — just that general sense of dread and heartbreak for their families.
It’s a fairly small town, not much crime ever happens (let alone something of that nature). It definitely caused a lot of pain and shook the whole community.”
4.“In 2010, a middle school teacher and her husband were brutally stabbed in the middle of the night. The husband passed away after chasing the assailants out, while the teacher survived with over 20 stab wounds. It turned out the entire thing was orchestrated by their 17-year-old niece. She did it because she was mad that they took her phone away and told her she couldn’t see her boyfriend. She ended up getting life without parole, as did her boyfriend and his friend.”
5.“A man kept the corpses of his deceased parents buried in the basement of his farmhouse so he could collect SSI and his father’s pension. He was able to collect for over five years before a repairman discovered the bodies.”
6.“A kid murdered his own brother in my town years ago. Police found the knife buried in the backyard. But his parents, to this day, do not believe he did it (despite him admitting it and going to prison). They still pay to put up billboards around the town looking for ‘help’ finding their son’s killer. The brother who did the killing is now out of prison (it’s depressing).”
7.“A cardiologist in our town beat his wife with a baseball bat in their second-floor bedroom. He dropped her head-first from the window to the ground so their kids wouldn’t see it. He put her in a car and drove to another street, crashed into a utility pole, and staged it like an accident. She was found behind the wheel in her nightgown (things like murders don’t happen in our little upscale suburb). He had a good lawyer — he was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 20 years. That was in the mid-’80s, so he’s been out of prison for a long time.”
8.“There was a serial drowner in my town. An older guy made friends with random people, took them swimming, and then drowned them. I think there were at least four drowning cases, but other deaths occurred on his land, too. The guy was convicted of the drownings, but the other deaths weren’t looked into.”
9.“My mom’s murder in Ohio back in the ’70s — nothing like that ever happened in our town. A 15-year-old boy in our neighborhood stabbed her to death (his sister was one of my best friends — she came over for sleepovers and was like my second family). The paramedics stood over her naked body as she bled out. The cops knew he did it, but they didn’t get around to arresting him until the next day (they didn’t read him his rights, and they botched the investigation). The sightseers started driving by that day and didn’t stop for a long time. He only had to serve time until he was 18 — he tried to escape a few days before his release. He got extra time and served until he was 21.”
“The boy’s family wasted no time putting the blame on my mom — they claimed the two of them were having an affair and that it was demonic fueled. Gratefully, there was very little news reported (even though there were plenty of news people there). I was able to keep the news reporting to a minimum (I was 18 at the time, and I threatened to sue).
A few years ago, my daughter ended up in a psychiatric ward, and she met the uncle of the kid who murdered my mom. He was actually younger than the kid (his older sister had him later). Now, mind you, this uncle was around 3 years old when this happened — he told my daughter everything that happened, the whole ‘demonic truth,’ and she chose to believe him.”
10.“My community is primarily an elderly population (over 60% of residents are considered senior citizens). My father was a doctor in this area and was the only one who dealt with ‘pain patients’ (pain patients are people who have chronic pain issues). They are known to constantly ask for more pain medication — no other local doctors would touch them (this was back in the ’90s before an overall awareness of the opioid epidemic). One of my dad’s patients was trading his pain meds for harder drugs. This guy tried to cheat the person he was selling to, and they ended up executing him in the woods. Somehow, the local paper decided that my dad was the head of a state-wide drug ring and had this guy killed.”
“They wrote a multi-page story on it, and to show how contentious it was, the author didn’t sign their name to the story. This (along with other things) caused an investigation into my dad’s practice. The investigation took two years, and during that time, he didn’t practice. This left a majority of our community without a doctor to treat them.
He was cleared of all wrongdoing, but going forward he could not write a script for pain meds without a secondary doctor’s approval. He decided to stop treating them.”
11.“I worked at a farmer’s market — I came in one morning to a very somber mood. Some people were crying — one vendor’s stall was just gone. Turns out one of the most beloved farmers we had was murdered. Never found out if there were drugs or alcohol involved, but apparently his dad shot him, called 911, and was dead himself by the time anyone got there. This guy was young — he had a wife and two kids under 10 years old.”
“But there is a small bright side to this: The community RALLIED around this family. The GoFundMe for his funeral got five times the asked-for amount on the first day it opened.
Other market workers volunteered at his farm to care for the animals and provide maintenance, and so many people signed up to bring meals that there was a waitlist of MONTHS.
Everyone made damn sure that his family would be taken care of.”
12.“A friend and co-captain of the soccer team brutally murdered his parents. He stabbed his dad over 20 times and chased his mom around the neighborhood. When he caught her, he bludgeoned her to death with a splitting maul. His mom was a teacher at our high school — I had her for English.”
13.“The crime in my hometown happened when I was a kid. A dude stabbed his cousin to death at the bar of the local TGI Friday’s over a girl. Now, my hometown is famous for having the only female mass-college shooter in the US, and I was a college student there at the time. The way the national media handled it (like some kind of ‘freak show’) was absolutely awful, and, I hope, 14 years later, the media gives more respect to victims and communities than they did to us.”
14.“I grew up in a suburban town outside Oklahoma City. There was one man who was homeless, known as ‘Bicycle Bob’ (a self-appointed nickname). A lot of us teens were friends with him since we would go to the park to smoke and drink, and he regularly would be camping there. After I graduated, I found out some high school kid thought it would ‘be funny’ to stab him to death. I was shocked to learn ‘Bicycle Bob’ died that way.”
15.“This happened in 2001 to two people who lived in my town but worked at a school the next town over. The principal was allegedly having an affair with a teacher. The principal shot and killed the teacher before killing himself. The teacher’s husband was a basketball coach at my middle school — I can’t imagine.”
16.And, “I live in a small town that’s never really had any big controversies or crimes happen. But six years ago, it came out that the fifth-grade teacher at my local Christian school had been sexually abusing, sexually exploiting, and grooming his male students over a five-year period (if not longer). He was also the coach of the seventh-grade basketball team and had a camera hidden in the bathroom where kids would shower and change after practice. He saved all the videos and photos on his laptop at his home (he was married and had a two-year-old son). He’s now serving a 60-year prison sentence — there were 146 counts of sexual abuse. He was also my teacher and coach (I was lucky enough to not have been a victim).”
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence, call 911. For anonymous, confidential help, you can call the 24/7 National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or chat with an advocate via the website.
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