15. Homicidal Co-Worker

I used to work with a guy who threw his fiancée off the balcony of his 14th floor apartment. It was a high-profile case in my country and I followed the trial all the way through the verdict and sentencing (for anyone wondering he got 26 years & will serve no fewer than 18). The whole thing really unsettled me.

He put her through hell; controlling her by exploiting her insecurities and monitoring her calls & texts.

The really depressing part is that she was so close to getting out too. She’d packed a bag of gear and had it stashed at a friend’s place, but he caught her trying to leave and tossed her over the balcony like a bag of trash. There’s actually CCTV footage that was circulated on mass media over here of him dragging her back inside the flat with a hand over her mouth so the neighbours wouldn’t head her screaming before he killed her.

That scene was extremely difficult to watch.

Obviously, the biggest shock comes in knowing you work so closely with people every day and have no idea what they’re capable of. I mean, just a few years ago I was doing data entry for this guy. Hell, I used to play office foosball with him a couple of times a week (he was really good at it. It’s funny, the things you remember). I find I’m generally wary of people these days and I think about that poor woman quite often. Whenever I do, I go hug my wife and tell her I love her.

16. Ex-Step-Mother Murderess

When I was a little girl, around 2 maybe, my father married a woman named Roxanne. She was pretty mean. She used to brush and comb my hair harder than necessary, and cut my fingernails so short they were painful, every time she cut them even after I complained. She yelled a lot. She had a cunt of a cocker spaniel named Buffy who was a lot like her.

When I was probably 7, they divorced, and I never saw her again. She sent yearly “update letters” at Christmas time after she married a Navy officer, and things seemed to be going well for her. Eventually the letters stopped coming and I didn’t much care. I never responded anyway. Fast forward to 2011.

She had remarried a guy whose kids I knew from my youth group days in 8th grade (years ago, I’m 28 now). She murdered him because he took a phone call from his ex girlfriend. She didn’t like that so much, so she strangled him so hard she broke the bone at the base of his skull/top of his neck (pretty rugged bone, you have to be trying pretty fucking hard to break it), which didn’t kill him, so she tore at his an*s and scrotum with pliers and a boxcutter, shoved a plastic bat through his scrotum up into his abdomen (I don’t even know how this is possible but it’s pretty goddamn brutal), and pulled his eyeball out.

He somehow lived through this and so she left him naked in the bathtub while she went and napped on the couch. She said she didn’t take her sleeping meds though, “so I could hear him if he needed me.” He died in the bathtub. Before she left him to nap, she said, “now you know how I feel,” talking about his receiving the call from his ex.

Her first defense was that what she did was in self defense, that her husband abused her. Supposedly there were bruises all over her that morning. Neighbors testified that they were quiet, good neighbors, and they had no idea what to think.

Self defense didn’t hold up, so she pled insanity. She was found competent to stand trial twice. She had brain surgery a few years ago and has been on antipsychotic meds for years.

In the end, she was found guilty and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

17. Bad News Bullies

Two guys I went to middle school/high school with were found guilty of murdering some guy. His body was found inside of a burning car.

One of them, I had known since middle school. Wannabe thug or whatever. On more than one occasion, him and his friends wanted to fight/jump me, but nothing ever came of it. I remember one Halloween, like 7 guys came up to my friends and I, him included, and a few of them wanted to jump me, but I was friends with one of them, so it didn’t happen. Despite all this, when he was alone, he would try to act friendly and shit. Never liked him.

The other one, I didn’t know much, but he sat behind me in my English class or whatever class it was in my senior year of high school. Don’t think I ever talked to him.

I guess them and the guy they killed were part of a marijuana smuggling operation. No idea why they killed the guy, but I guess it took a few months to link them to the murder. They were both found guilty of voluntary manslaughter and, I think, got sentenced to 25 years in prison.

As far as when I found it, it wasn’t all that surprising. Again, I didn’t know much of the second guy, but reading up on some of the other things he’s been arrested/charged for, it’s not surprising. Knowing how the first guy was in middle/high school, I’d imagine he was just following what the second guy was doing and didn’t come up with the decision to kill the guy himself.

Don’t know, though.