Are you a crime fanatic? If you’ve binged any of the crime-based series that have populated streaming services over the last few years, you can probably count yourself one. If you do, you’re going to want to pore over these entries from AskReddit users to see if you’ve heard of these particularly disturbing characters.
1. Horrible story
“Vince Li – While on a Greyhound bus, he stabbed and beheaded a 22 year old guy that was sitting beside him. He then started cutting up other parts of the guy’s body and started eating it. Luckily the other passengers got out, but when the bus driver and 2 other passengers tried to get him away from the body, he tried to slash at them. The most messed up part was the fact that he was walking back and forth in the bus, while carrying around this poor guy’s head.
I remember when I first heard about it, I was absolutely terrified of riding the Greyhound, and I still am. The whole situation was so messed up.”
2. Psycho
“Danny LaPlante is up there for me. He was only 15-17 at the time and had a horrible childhood but was so so creepy. At age 15 he went on ONE date with a girl and she wasn’t interested in taking it any further. She moves on with her life and presumably forgets about Danny.
Fast forward sometime later and the girl and her family (she lived with her sister and her dad) keep experiencing paranormal happenings in their house (stuff being moved, banging sounds, creepy messages sprawled on walls, typical scary stuff). The dad did not believe that these things were actually happening and thought his daughters were trying to get his attention because he was working a lot and their mother had passed.
After months of this crap, the dad is called home from work and finds his kids crying hysterically at the neighbors house and refusing to go back in the house. This is the point he realizes that they are not doing this themselves so he decides to investigate. He goes into the house, finds a message written on the walls, something like ‘I am in the house, come find me.’
Walking around the house he finds stuff rearranged and disheveled, and a photo of his 15 year old daughter with a knife through it. He hears a noise in his bedroom and walks in to find someone wearing his deceased wife’s wedding dress. The person turns around and it is Danny LaPlante, in this wedding dress, with war paint on his face and holding a hatchet. Danny just laughs maniacally and dad hauls butt out of the f**king house. He locks the door behind him and calls 911 while he and his neighbor guarded the exit.
The police arrive and find no one in the house, which doesn’t make any sense because they never saw Danny leave. Then, one of the daughters notices a big cabinet is shifted slightly; the police move it and find a big hole in the wall and a tunnel system that ran throughout the entire house, with peepholes everywhere. They find Danny in there and he is just laughing and being creepy. It turns out he was living there for MONTHS.
They arrest him, decide to try him as an adult which means he gets bail. Two years later while he is on bail he murders a woman and her very young children in their home. They lived in a house that was next to the woods behind his mother’s home and the police suspect he was watching them for some time before he killed them.
Anyway, he is currently serving life in prison and all of his appeals have been denied.”
3. Unabomber
“I am quite partial to Ted Kczynski a.k.a. the Unabomber.
Famous for his manifesto and bombings… but the possibility that he was partially created by Harvard is what gets me. While being described as no where near ready for college, let alone a place like Harvard (started college at 16), he was a part of a psych experiment where they had him write his ideals on society. He was told he would be debating other students, but instead was basically being embarrassed every week for 3 years by possible CIA and prosecutors. It’s said that this might have led to his hatred of technology and what made him “snap.”
It’s not certain that it led to his bombings, but it is discussed.
But even outside of that, he made bombs that got better with each one, and his deliveries got more and more intricate, to the point that he was mailing to one professor with the return addressed to another who was the actual target.”
4. Zero protection
“Lavrentiy Beria.
In another world he might have just been a normal serial murderer. But he happened to be the second most powerful individual in the Soviet Union under Stalin, as head of the notorious NKVD. Murder and torture were his actual job and he used his position to indulge any and all of his perversions at will.
If you escaped from someone like Ted Bundy you could at least call the cops and feel moderately safe. Beria’s victims had zero protection. You’re only hope was to never come to his attention.”
5. Terrifying
“Richard Speck murdered eight nurses in Chicago in 1966 in their apartment. The only one to survive hid under a bed while he was stabbing the others.
His story gets weirder. There is a video of him in prison where he had taken illicitly obtained hormones so he could grow breasts and prostitute himself to other inmates. Or he may have been forced to take them. Strange either way.”
6. Creepy
“I always thought the Oakland County Child Killer was pretty horrific and he was never caught. One of his victims disappeared and the little boy’s parents were filmed on TV saying how much they wanted him home so they could feed him his favorite dinner (fried chicken). The kid’s autopsy revealed he’d eaten fried chicken as his last meal. He also used to position the bodies in strange, gruesome ways.”
7. Nightmare man
“Albert Fish. One of those reads where after I’m done I think to myself “Why the hell did I want to read all this?” He’s definitely not for the faint of heart. The letter he wrote to a little boys family and police gives me chills.”
8. Criminal mastermind
“Less creepy and more fascinating is George C. Parker. He’s most well known for setting up a fake office to sell fake deeds to NYC landmarks to wealthy tourists, most notably the Brooklyn Bridge. What people don’t know is he sold the bridge twice. Twice a week. For 30 years. He also sold Madison Square Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty and Grant’s Tomb several times.
He was arrested in 1908 and left the courthouse by casually putting on a sheriff’s jacket and hat, then continued his shenanigans for another two decades before finally being caught for good in 1928. Why there isn’t a movie about this guy is beyond me.”
9. Toy Box Murderer
“David Parker Ray, aka the “toy box murderer”.
“With his $100,000 trailer that was full of sex toys and torture devices, Ray began picking up vulnerable prostitutes to bring them back to his “Toy Box” torture chamber. While there, the defenseless and powerless women would be subjected to rape and torture. Ray’s trailer was equipped with straps, surgical instruments, chains, pulleys, spreader bars, clamps, and syringes. His trailer also featured a gynecology table with a mirror set above it and an electric torture device. Ray, being the sick man that he was would record himself torturing his innocent victims.” “
10. Hitman
“Richard Kuklinski. His career as a contract killer sounds almost like the premise of a movie or video game. He fulfilled contracts all throughout the world, working for almost every major American mafia family. He killed over 200 people, all in horrifyingly sadistic ways.
Such as cutting off a man’s nuts, skinning him alive, pouring salt on the exposed meat, and then feeding him to sharks. He was also known to feed living men to rats. Kuklinski also claims to have killed both Jimmy Hoffa and Roy Demeo. He did this all while living in a suburban neighborhood with his wife and three children, all who had no idea what he did for a living.”
11. The Family
“The Manson “family” girls rate up there for me. Women who aren’t inherently killers, but go so nutty for a charismatic guy they torture and kill other women.”
12. Wow
“Tararre.
An 18th century soldier and showman who had an insatiable appetite. He smelled foul, had skin that could be stretched almost inhumanely and his throat had such severe scars from unnatural widening that one could see down his throat and directly into his stomach.
Despite all of this, he was unusually thin and gaunt.
As a trick he would eat a meal made for fifteen men and would often eat live kittens, puppies or eels whole.
He’d often eat corks, stones and hunks of metal as well to impress his audience.
He was at one point contracted by the government to eat supplies or battle plans during war, and get himself beyond enemy lines only to pass them later.
“The dogs and cats fled in terror at his aspect, as if they had anticipated the kind of fate he was preparing for them.
Courville and Percy decided to test Tarrare’s capacity for food. A meal had been prepared for 15 labourers near the hospital gates; although generally hospital staff restrained Tarrare in the presence of food, on this occasion Courville allowed him to reach the table undisturbed. Tarrare ate the entire meal of two large meat pies, plates of grease and salt and four gallons of milk, and then immediately fell asleep; Courville noted that Tarrare’s belly became taut and inflated like a large balloon. On another occasion Tarrare was presented with a live cat. He tore the cat’s abdomen open with his teeth and drank its blood, and proceeded to eat the entire cat aside from its bones, before vomiting up its fur and skin. Following this, hospital staff offered Tarrare a variety of other animals including snakes, lizards and puppies, all of which were eaten; he also swallowed an entire eel without chewing, having first crushed its head with his teeth”
He was suspected of eating a small boy due to his incredible hunger.
“He was also caught several times within the hospital drinking from patients undergoing bloodletting, and attempting to eat the bodies in the hospital mortuary. Other doctors believed that Tarrare was mentally ill and pressed for him to be transferred to a lunatic asylum, but Percy was keen to continue his experiments and Tarrare remained in the military hospital.
After some time, a 14-month-old child disappeared from the hospital, and Tarrare was immediately suspected. Percy was unable or unwilling to defend him, and the hospital staff chased Tarrare from the hospital, to which he never returned.”
He eventually died of sudden and mysterious circumstances but before he died he believed his bedridden condition was caused by him swallowing a golden fork which he never passed.
The fork was never found.”
13. The Night Stalker
“Richard Ramirez. He had a super messed up childhood and ended up being one scary and creepy motherf*cker.
If someone sent him a sexually explicit letter while he was in prison, he’d send them something back that was considerably more explicit. I found quite a few of those letters on Tumblr.”
14. Killer couple
“Paul Bernardo and his wife, Karla Homolka. Together, they raped and murdered at least three minors, one of them being Karla’s sister Tammy.
After giving Karla a plea deal, Canadian authorities found hidden tapes showing that she was a much more active participant than she had admitted.
Bernardo was also the notorious Scarborough Rapist in Ontario, and is suspected in a string of rapes in Amherst, NY.”
15. BTK
“BTK would break into people’s house and sit there waiting for hours at a time. Would wait til they been home for a period of time then calmly appear from his hiding place, a closet or whatever, the the family up and murder them in horrific fashion.”
