A bone-chilling Reddit post asked users who had personally known someone who turned out to be a killer to share their stories. On the r/AskReddit sub, Redditor u/Anonymousdisaster_ specifically asked if these folks suspected that the future murderers would do it someday and requested they share details.
“People who knew a killer, did you ever suspect they would do it?” the post title reads. “What happened?”
While it’s a cliche to claim that it’s always the one you least suspect, there’s a pretty even split between people who never would have guessed that the killer they knew would harm a fly and those who felt certain they could predict the course of the future. Signs of aggression, paranoia, and entitlement were the most common traits among those seemingly destined to murder.
However, the sweet and generous caregivers who snapped serve as a reminder that no aspect of one’s personality can ever predict future violence with any amount of certainty. But some of these stories might help inspire those in abusive relationships to get out as soon as possible.
15 people who knew a killer share their stories:
1. The coworker who kept a list.
“I had a coworker who went from being a really smart and cultured guy, to having wild ideas about catching STDs from working with coworkers (who didn’t have STDs that I was aware of) and started getting really aggressive with certain people,” says u/Dreamfinder82. “One day he came in and started taking pictures of the people he had been aggressive with, the last one being me.”
“I never saw him again, but googled him every so often because I just knew he was going to end up in the news one day. About five years later he shot up a hospital.”
2. The strangler who set off lizard brain alarms.
“I had this coworker that the very first time I met him, the primal part of my lizard brain was just all like ‘DANGER DANGER!’” writes u/moonbunnychan. “Something in my brain just KNEW and I always felt really uneasy around him. He never did anything directly to me, but just something about him felt off in a way I can’t really even describe.”
“One day he doesn’t come in for his shift, and it turned out he was in jail for strangling his girlfriend to death the night before.”
3. The nicest, friendliest child murderer.
“I was absolutely stunned to learn my older brother’s friend from high school, who was the nicest, friendliest houseguest when he was over, ended up murdering his 2 kids years later,” claims u/entity2. “He was like a second older brother to us younger kids, and lived with us for a while when there was some family issue on his side.”
4. The habitual drunk driver.
“A former roommate hit and killed a guy on a bike while he was drunk driving. He drove home from the bar drunk every single day,” wrote u/loltittysprinkles. “I had been saying for years he was going to kill someone and then it finally happened. Did 6 months.”
5. The $5 mini-bike killers.
“Four students in my high school murdered a 13 year old boy that caught them stealing a mini-bike,” recalled u/Adddicus. “When I heard about it, I had no doubt that they did it. None. And they were all convicted.”
“EDIT: I just wanted to ad that the mini-bike had no engine, and had an estimated value of $5.”
6. The nurse who murdered his wife with a hammer.
“We used to meet up for a week every Spring with two couples,” said u/Agitated_Answer8908. “One of the couples were old college friends and the other couple were coworkers of theirs. We really liked them and their two young children. We got together for several years. Then we got the call that the wife had been killed with a hammer in their basement.”
“The scene was expertly cleaned and police were zeroing in on the husband who happened to be a nurse. He ended up injecting himself with something to dull the pain then stabbed himself in the heart. We never suspected he was capable of something like this and we don’t know why he did it.”
7. The wealthy jerk who killed his girlfriend.
“I grew up with a guy in a wealthy area in Maryland. He was an asshole then. Really mean to me after he told his friends he had a crush on me (in like seventh grade) and then they made fun of him,” u/why_renaissance wrote.
“In college he was charged and convicted of murdering his girlfriend. He got drunk, kicked her door in, and bashed her head against a wall. I was surprised in the sense that it’s weird to see a guy you knows face on the cover of people magazine for murder, but not at all surprised that it was him, if that makes sense. It was highly publicized nationally because of who his family is.
8. The elder caregiver who snapped.
“I was SHOCKED. This was a woman I’d let hold my child, was best friends with my SIL, came to all the family parties, and we’d always had a good time when I saw her,” u/DontCryYourExIsUgly recounted.
“She was the caretaker for her mom with Alzheimer’s and I think must have had some sort of mental problem going on for a while, because she smothered her mom and has special charges for elder abuse and the crime involving great violence. She was found wandering the streets, asking strangers to, ‘Please kill me.’”
9. The unstable woman who “accidentally” ran over a cyclist.
“Know a woman, my friend’s ex-wife, she ‘accidentally’ killed a cyclist while driving,” writes u/Sufficient-Berry-827. “I don’t believe her story at all. She says she sneezed and hit him, but they were in a residential area where the speed limit was 15mph (near a school) and the extent of his injuries don’t make sense for what she says happened.”
“She is f*ckin’ crazy. She is prone to emotional outbursts, tantrums, speeding when angry—just unstable as hell. After this man died, she posted all over social media about how SHE was so traumatized and how SHE’s a survivor of trauma and how she wants to be an example of a ‘strong woman’ to her kids.”
10. The abusive ex-fiancé who became a family annihilator.
“My ex fiancé was violent with me on the night of our engagement party and I honestly thought he was going to kill me,” u/iliveinthelight recalled. “No one believed me when I told them, no one believed he’d even be capable of hurting me in that way.”
“8 years later, like literally exactly 8 years later to the day, after marrying the woman he cheated on me with and having a baby together, he murdered them both and is now locked away pending trial. He stabbed them to death, flew to another city and lived it up in a hotel for two days before turning himself in.”
11. The sweet and talented guy who “freed” his mother and grandparents.
“Absolutely would never have predicted it. Super sweet, super talented guy I knew in college,” u/twistthespine claimed.
“He had a psychotic break and murdered his mom, grandparents, and the grandparents’ carer. Then he walked next door naked and covered in blood and told the neighbors ‘I freed them.’”
12. The shy anime fan who became the Dayton mass shooter.
“I had a friend group online for a couple years, and someone invited a friend of theirs into the group chat. Shy kid, seemed like a baby compared to the rest of us in our late 20s,” wrote u/NiteOwl94. “All I knew about this guy’s interests was that he liked anime. So I hit him up, we made small talk about anime. He recommended me Food Wars.”
“I woke up to texts around noon the following day from my friend who told me to check the news. There was a mass shooting in Ohio. Sad, gut wrenching even,” they continued. “And then I saw who did it, and it was lonely anime guy. The Dayton, Ohio shooter, Connor Betts, recommended me Food Wars, all casual like, told me to let him know what I think about it, he then woke up the next day and went on a shooting spree.”
13. The husband who threatened to kill his wife all the time, then did.
“Growing up towards the end of elementary school I would stay the night with a friend,” says u/direlyn. “His parents were always fighting, and numerous times his dad said he was going to kill his mother. His mother dared him to do it every fucking time.”
“While it was still a shock, it wasn’t really a surprise when he actually did it. I was in high school. His dad murdered his mother, then went into the police station and told them what he did.”
14. The hot-headed pub hopper.
“Guy l used to go to school with, then very occasionally a drinking partner killed a squaddie in the pub we had been drinking in,” claims u/amlarobot64. “Apparently, the squaddie had touched Paul’s girlfriend up and Paul politely asked him to stop.”
“They were pulled apart and thrown out. Outside they continued and the squaddie pulled a blade. Paul took it off him, then stabbed him 8 times. He was picked up in Dover the next morning. I knew he was hot headed but f*ck.”
15. The mother-daughter murder team.
“I worked with a woman and her adult daughter for about 6 months before I found they had both gone to prison for teaming up to murder their husband/father,” writes u/ahsmabaar_thegardner. “I wasn’t very surprised because it was obvious they had both had rough lives, but they were also both very petite and friendly so it was a little surprising they had it them.”
The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here to get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.
