One thing about me is that I get very invested in true crime books, podcasts, documentaries…you name it, I’ve consumed it. And oftentimes, it gets me thinking, what if somebody I know is capable of these horrific crimes and I just didn’t even know it?
A while back, Reddit user, peasantchoker asked, “People who knew Murderers, when did you know something was off?” Here are some of those chilling stories:
Some stories include topics like sexual assault, substance abuse, domestic violence, and suicide.
1.“I knew someone when I was in my early twenties in India. He was a dirtbag, but a fun guy under the right circumstances. I made sure to talk with him and be as pleasant as I could, while keeping him at an arm’s distance. I moved away, and then my mum told me several years later that he and his four brothers were hired killers.”
“Apparently, two people got into a fight over a property, and one of them hired this bunch of thugs. They waited for their victim to get home, get changed, and relax, when they exploded an oil can in front of his house. When he came running out to see what was going on, they threw red chilli powder in his face to blind him and chopped him to bits with large sickles. Apparently, the body was in multiple pieces at the funeral. I knew the victim as well. Guy had two daughters.”
2.“It was my brother. He died when I was 13. He was 18 at the time. I knew he was capable from the time I was six and he was 11. He used to play death games. He would sit on my chest, use his knees to hold down my arms, suffocate me until I passed out, and then wake me up and do it again. There were days when he did this for an hour or more. That’s on top of the other kinds of abuse: anything you can think of has happened. One time, he made me stand in front of him while he punched me in the balls repeatedly. He wanted to ‘make me a man,’ and he wouldn’t stop until I didn’t flinch from the pain. I couldn’t tell any of this because I was more afraid of him than confident that my parents could or would do anything. He was my primary babysitter.”
“From 12 to 18, my brother got in a lot of trouble. He was arrested multiple times for assault. He was in and out of alternative programs like Outward Bound and Boot Camp. Finally, at 17, he was sentenced to 2 years in juvenile detention. He spent a year in and came out to live with a preacher in another nearby town. Eventually, they convinced the parole board he was rehabilitated, and over the objections of our local police, let him off all probation and parole. That preacher introduced him to friends of his, with whom my brother eventually moved in. He also met a girl.
They met right before summer started, and he was in love. To her, it was a summer fling. When she broke up with him, partly due to his controlling/abusive behavior, he lost it. He came back home one weekend to meet up with some friends. He also came to see us. Later, my mom would say she knew something was up with him, but that is all hindsight. Sunday night, he went back home.
Monday night, he killed his three roommates execution style with a gun he got from a friend who had perpetrated a burglary of our local hardware store. He also stole one of the victim’s cars. He then drove eight hours to where his ex was in college. He arrived pretty early Tuesday morning and somehow got into her dorm room.
Tuesday morning, he found his ex and shot her in the foot, threatened to kill her, and then locked himself, her, and a few of her dorm mates in a room. A 6-hour hostage standoff with police ensued.
Eventually, he stuck his head out the window one too many times, and a police sniper shot him right in the neck. He tried shooting at the cops as they stormed in, but he was dying. He died later in the hospital, and my family became national news for a short time.
When did I know? I knew the moment I was six and the bad times began. I thought I’d be his first victim. The day he died was the first day of my real life. A day without terror.”
David Wall / Getty Images
3.“Not mine, but my wife’s story. She attended Columbine HS at the time of the shooting. She said she never could have expected the shooters to do what they did. They were just weird, not too dissimilar to any other weird kid, but they didn’t talk about what they were planning in public.”
4.“A kid in high school killed his grandmother one day before school. I didn’t really interact with him much. We weren’t in the same grade, so we didn’t have many classes together or any mutual friends, but I did remember seeing him quite a few times as I was working in the library during my lunch periods that year. Just a quiet person, didn’t talk much. He would sometimes just be sitting there and then get frustrated at himself or whatever he was doing and kinda flip out a little. Like a little bigger than ‘this math problem is really pissing me off’ and a little less than full-on flipping out. But it would seemingly be about nothing. He wouldn’t have any pencils or paper, so I don’t think he was doing homework when he would do this. Sometimes he would have a book in front of him. But also again, didn’t really pay too much attention to him.”
“One morning, he killed his grandma with a lamp before school. I forgot the reasoning. I think it was something like she caught him sleeping in, and he went ballistic on her. It was extremely sad.”
Douglas Sacha / Getty Images
5.“I am the survivor of an attempted family annihilation. I didn’t like my stepfather from the moment my mother introduced him. Every time I was around him, I was afraid. Just constant dread. My stomach and chest would tighten, and I’d feel like I couldn’t breathe. He had these blue eyes that looked like something you’d see in a taxidermied animal. No life in them.”
“I didn’t tell my mother because I wanted her to be happy, and I was afraid she’d think I was being dramatic and dismiss it if I tried. He started beating us both shortly after moving in. They got married in May of 1996, and he murdered my mother and tried to kill me in January of ‘98. He’s still in prison.”
6.“A friend of a friend at college used to hang around and smoke cigarettes with us. He never spoke much, and that always made me feel uncomfortable. A few months back, his grandfather tried to get him sectioned on a psychiatric ward, but they rejected him, stating he wasn’t bad enough. Two weeks later, he stabbed his grandmother to death and cut her face off in the middle of the street.”
Related: 42 Wildly Entitled People Who Thought The World Revolved Around Them
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7.“I played Dungeons and Dragons with a guy on deployment for a few months while I was in the Navy. We hung out in the same group of people. I stopped playing because he kept trying to assault all the female characters. When we got back from deployment, the FBI and NCIS were pier side waiting for him. He and some other guys had raped and killed a woman whose husband was on deployment.”
8.“My neighbor and first sort of boyfriend ended up running over his girlfriend’s mother after stealing her money for drugs. He was always a bit controlling and a lot out of control, but as soon as he started doing serious drugs around 17, he became a serious concern. He ran away from home and disappeared, only for his mom to get a call that he had killed someone.”
AzmanL / Getty Images
9.“My friend’s dad was super creepy. He wouldn’t talk to women much and made his wife do all the housework. No one could eat unless he was there and ate first. It turns out he was raping and killing girls in his truck while he was hauling goods for a trucking company. No one can give a good estimate of how many girls died, but he kept their bloody underwear as trophies. There were at least 30 pairs.”
10.“He was the son of my dad’s coworker/friend. Before my father got laid off this year, they had worked together for 32 years. So, we did occasionally see each other while growing up. The son was my age, and went to the same middle school and high school as me. I know that he had some problems with impulse control. For example, on his way to our middle school one day, he saw a baseball bat lying on a front lawn and decided to use it to smash in the windshield of the car in front of that house. He was also obsessed with death and would talk about wanting to see someone die. Obviously, I was not a big fan of him and did not seek out a friendship.”
“A friend of mine — still my best friend today — felt bad for him and would talk to him before classes and such. One day, she was pulled into the principal’s office and told that they had found a list he had made of people not to kill in his imagined school shooting. She was on it. I’m not sure what happened with him after that, but I didn’t see him again until high school. I see my old classmate’s mugshot on the local news. He had killed a missing boy. He and his small group of friends had befriended this kid and driven him out into the desert one night. My old classmate shot him with a crossbow and then slit his throat.”
ATU Images / Getty Images
11.“It was a gradual progression of scary behavior. My ex seemed normal at first, but a little narcissistic about how great he was, and how confident he knew people, and what was going to happen. He told me I would always be his. I laughed and said, ‘Haha, what if we break up, I marry someone else, and have kids?’ He said it didn’t matter, that I, and that kid would be his. I thought maybe he thought it was romantic, but it creeped me out.”
“A month or two later, we broke up, I moved far away, and got married. I knew his sister, and she told me how he kept saying I will be his no matter what. Something in that moment made me believe he would find me and kill my S.O. Like, you never want to believe someone would kill, but my instincts told me to be afraid. Luckily, it seemed his interest in me died down over time.
In 2018, I got a phone call from an old mutual friend. They asked if I had heard about what he did on the news. Of course, I didn’t, but I had a bad feeling. He apparently worked at the airport and kept trying to ask a woman out who had a fiancé and a child. She refused him many times. Then he waited outside her home for her fiancé to show up. Once the fiancé drove up, he ran up to the driver’s side window and shot him. The fiancé didn’t survive. My ex didn’t make it far before he was caught by the police and thrown in prison.”
12.“I knew Esteban Santiago [a convicted ISIS sympathizer]. Not intimately familiar, but I worked at the hostel he lived at before he flew to Florida. He was very reserved and talked to himself a lot. He didn’t seem off, even for the crew of misfits that we all knew and loved at the Qupqugiaq. I was working the night he took a little pelican gun case and got in a cab to the airport. He just stared at the ground and nodded as he walked out. The next day after he made the news, the FBI shut the place down and combed through the dumpsters for evidence. I would’ve bet money two other regulars were far more likely to go on a killing spree.”
Don Mason / Getty Images
13.“She wouldn’t let me meet her new stepfather at first. She never talked about him. I didn’t get to come over. I met him once and immediately disliked him, an unstable and disheveled person. She got quiet at school. A few months later, he stabbed the family to death.”
14.“On social media, he was an endless barrage of selfies. Some were of him holding his knives and guns, just wishing someone would try him. Others were him shirtless in the bathroom showing off his satanic tattoos. He believed the Bible was real, but he chose to worship Satan. He was also a violent drunk who hated women, but that never seemed to stop women from dating him. I always thought it was strange that whenever he got a new girlfriend, a lot of his exes would come out of the woodwork trying to warn the new girl that she should stay away from him. This happened all the time, but they would always get brushed off and accused of being jealous.”
“When he got to his last girlfriend, it was business as usual. One day, she had had enough and called the police to report him getting drunk and slamming her against the wall. While she was on the phone, he went to get his gun. I heard the 911 call. The last thing you hear is her saying, “he’s coming back now,” and then screaming. They found her body in the neighbor’s yard and his in the front doorway.”
Jub Rubjob / Getty Images
15.“My coworker was just super narcissistic and was always talking about his childhood in Alaska. We worked in fast food, and I was his boss, and one day he asked to go cut ice out of the freezer with a knife… A few years later, I heard he killed someone. I still do not know what his motive was, but I definitely wouldn’t put it past him.”
16.And finally, “My best friend growing up went down a road of heavy drug abuse. He couldn’t keep a steady job, so the only way to feed the habit was to rob people, including my family, many times. After serving several years, though not his full sentence, he was released this summer. Apparently, years of prison did nothing because he was arrested about a month ago for possession and identity theft. He apparently gave the police my name and address when they stopped him. It is actually disturbing because I have moved since he was locked up and have had no contact with him. The fact that he was able to rattle off my new address does not sit well with me. We caught him casing our old house when he knew I was at work. Anyway, the police were obviously easily able to determine who he really was.”
A few days later, the local police department released a story stating he was being charged with the murder of a man found dead a couple of months prior. He was strangled to death in his home. While he did become a massive piece of garbage, I never would have suspected he could do anything like that. He hasn’t yet been convicted, but from the sounds of it, they have strong evidence against him.
LEREXIS / Getty Images
Responses have been edited for length/clarity.
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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.
If you are concerned that a child is experiencing or may be in danger of abuse, you can call or text the National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-422-4453 (4.A.CHILD); service can be provided in over 140 languages.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-800-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
If you or anyone you know has information on a missing person case, call local law enforcement first. You can also contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678 (THE-LOST) or visit the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System site for regional case assistance.
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