79 Family Secrets That Involve Shocking Crimes

A great grandparent, years ago during an occupation, was being approached repeatedly for s*x by a soldier/guard assigned to her village. One day she lured him into her home, st**bed him repeatedly and threw him down a well. The entire family knew and no one drank from that well ever again.

Edit: Grammar/Updates: Ok, called my mom to get more info. This is like a great great great versus just a great grandparent. Also confirmed that her and her parents and grandparents never used the well so that’s about like 200+ years of no well use. Location is Eastern Europe.

On a personal note I’ve never got this many upvotes, I brag to my wife and she says “like most achievements of men, all the heavy lifting in this story was done by a woman”.

Twin brothers boosted a car and rob the 711 like 1/2 mile from house. Ditched car 10 houses from theirs. How were they caught?
Officers respond to alarm triggered by clerk.
Officer: Got an alarm here what happened.
Clerk: Tim and Tom came in and robbed the store.
Officer: How do you know it was these guys?
Clerk: They are 6' 4" twins who come in every day. I know their shape and voice.

The car
911 operator: 911 what is your emergency.
Neighbor: Was watching TV and 2 guys park a car in front of my house. One guy got out with like a windex bottle and cleaned all the door handles and door areas. Then opened door and the other guy took the stuff and cleaned the inside areas. Then they ran off up the street.
Dispatch: Can you describe the 2 individuals?
Neighbor: Well it was Tim and Tom the twins that live up the street from me they're like 6' 4" and they are twins.

When I was a young teen, the boys from the neighborhood and I loved playing pinball and video games at our local bowling alley. Problem was we didn't have enough money to enjoy our new a*******n. We decided to do something about that little problem.

We started with a very rudimentary system. We actually scotch taped a piece of thread to a quarter and were able to fish it up and down a couple times before the string would break, or the tape would give out. This worked fairly well, but we wanted and needed more.

Our next plan was a little more professional. We somehow concocted a scheme to "make" quarters. A few lessons in science class had actually stuck, and we realized that we needed something to fool the coin mechanism in the pinball machine into thinking that whatever it was we made our quarters with was an actual quarter. We ended up deciding that lead would be our material of choice. We used lead for a couple of reasons. A couple of the guy's father was an avid hunter. He even reloaded his own s*****n shells. Because of this he had a burner setup in his shop to melt down lead. Another reason is that lead is not magnetic (science!). We made a mold out of plaster and used the burner to melt lead to make our quarters. But where to get more lead??

One of us came up with the brilliant thought that tire weights were made of lead! Carrying screwdrivers and pliers we scoured the parking lots of shopping centers. We would wander through and drop down out of sight between cars. Using the tools we had brought we would manage to get the tire weights off with little trouble. We were in business!

Our production line was soon up and running. We would melt lead, pour it into our mold, cool it and then move on to finishing our new "quarter". The finishing process was crude, but effective. We would snip off the burr where the lead was poured. We would then file down the edge, making sure it stayed mostly round. Using steel wool and a polishing cloth we would then shine the quarters. Now came the trial run.

We went to the bowling alley with a few quarters to see if our harebrained scheme would actually work. In they went, and the pinball machine lit up and was ready to be played. Success! We intensified our production and soon we had bunches of quarters. We were thrilled! We could play video games any time we wanted! Every day after school you'd find us at the bowling alley, happily playing our games. But our downfall was soon to come.

We never thought of the fact that someone might notice a bunch of fake quarters being used in their video games and pinball machines. It literally never crossed our early teenaged minds. We just knew we were having a blast. One fateful day we went to the bowling alley as usual. We started playing games and soon some men approached us. They started questioning us and accusing us. We were scared to d***h! One of the guys yelled "Run!" and we took off as fast as we could. We made it to the doors and down the steps we went. We all lived on the same cul-de-sac and that's the direction we headed. Running as fast as we could, we briefly split up. The men that were chasing us only followed one of us kids. He made the colossal mistake of running straight to his house and through the front door. From there our crime spree ended.

A few days later I was in class when I was called to the office. When I got there my father was sitting with a man I'd never seen before. He was wearing a black suit with a black tie. I had to go before the principal, my father and a member of the United States Secret Service! Although they take the counterfeiting of US currency very seriously, they understood that it was just a bunch of knucklehead kids making quarters to play video games. He actually told me that he was impressed with the quality of the quarters. He also said that they had recovered over $75 in fake quarters! We had made, and used, over 300 quarters! We had to make restitution for the money and the charge was placed on our juvenile records. It was explained to us that if we kept our noses clean the charge would be expunged. Luckily for me I learned my lesson and stayed on the straight and narrow for the rest of my young adult life.

And that, fellow redditors is how I was charged with counterfeiting US currency. If that doesn't define the meaning of a crazy crime, I don't know what would.

My friend got blackout drunk and stole a bulldozer that had the keys left in it.

He turned it on and obviously didn't know how to drive it so he just ended up making the scoopy part go up and down for a bit before the cops came.

They actually let him go too.

My sister-in-law worked on a ski hill. One week there was a promotion by a company where they would blow up big inflatables (like the big gorillas you see in car lots). She had seen them blow them up and deflate them for days, so she knew what the deflated ones looked like. One day she was leaving work and one of these deflated mascot thingies was right behind her car. My sister-in-law has never stolen anything in her entire life, but at that moment she decided out of the blue that she wanted that blow-up. She plopped it in the back and drove home. When I came to visit a couple weeks later she was freaking out about it. She asked me if I wanted it, just to get the evidence out of her house. That is the story of how I came to own a 2-story-high inflatable cow.

A male relative of mine skydived off the World Trade Center back in the 1980s. He wore rubber gloves to climb the electric fence and had his parachute hidden ~~under a trench coat~~ in a shopping bag.

He had a "get-away-car" waiting to him at the bottom, driven by his ~~then wife~~ friend. His then wife took the photos.

He got caught two days later, where he had to give the city an apology and paid a small fine, no jail time.

I digitally restored the photos of his jump and the newspaper articles a few years ago He is a testament to crazy uncles everywhere.

And to those who are going to correct me and say it was "base jumping," I asked him about this years ago. He said, at the time, the term "base jumping" hadn't been created yet. It was a skydive when he made it, and it will remain a skydive in his memory.

My mom set a dude on fire.

When I was young I had a babysitter, named Chris. He was the uncle of my two best friends, sisters Abby and Becca. He was also a*****e. He liked to do things to me in front of them. Make them listen to my cry and scream. Nothing physical, I should mention. More, psychological.

Anyway, I didn’t tell anyone about it. (And in fact only learned this story about 2 years ago). But it turns out that my best friends did.

They told my mom and she was pissed.

Soon after that there’s a party at my friends parents house. My mom goes and sees Chris. He’s all nice to her. They’re outside in the backyard.

She starts kinda joking around. Roughhousing. Messing with him.

She grabs some lighter fluid and sprays some on Him.

Hahaha, just a joke.

She lights a match.

“Ha! You wouldn’t do it, would you?”

And she lights him on fire.

According to my mom, he was put out quickly so he was fine.

But she told him that’s what its like when you’re scared for your life. And then she left.

Apparently he flew back to Florida the next day.

Human smuggling.

My great great great grandfather's aunts ran a station on the Underground Railroad. Which was morally right, but legally wrong.

So before I was born my parents were apparently going through some tough financial issues and were facing eviction if they couldn’t come up with a certain amount of money by a certain date.

My father decided the best way to handle this situation would be to rob a bank.

So the story as I was told it goes like this... my father walked into a small bank with a ski mask on and his hand in his pocket. He went up to a teller and handed her a bag, telling her he was robbing the place, he had a g*n and exactly how much money he wanted, which turned out to be exactly the amount he needed to avoid eviction.

He got the money, apologized to the teller and then left. He was never caught.

The next part of the story is a little weird and even I have a hard time believing it but I know my dad, he is no liar. Apparently a year or two later my dad went back to the same bank he robbed every day until he found the teller he robbed previously. He walked up without a mask and handed her an envelope and immediately left the area. In the envelope was the exact amount of money he stole and a note saying that the money was for the teller, a gift and how incredibly sorry he was for scaring her when he robbed the place. Again, he was never caught.

My father is a very honorable man who was raised in poverty on a Indian reservation. Because of the a***e he went through, both at home and at school (Residential schools have a bit of a history to them) he vowed that his kids would never have to go through what he did. I truly believe that robbing that bank was a result of that vow but emotionally hurting that woman at the bank really ate away at him so he risked getting arrested to try and make it right.

Edit: Guess I should have said this but he didn’t actually have a g*n, he just told the teller he did. In reality his pocket was empty.

It's not a bad crime or anything, but it was illegal at the time.
So, in Germany, up until a few years ago, we still had a general draft for the army. And a generation ago it was very hard to get out of it.

My uncle was a hardcore pacifist, so going to the army wasn't an option for him. But being accepted as a conscientious objector at that time basically required you to be a devout Christian and use the bible as an argument for why you couldn't k**l another human. And my uncle was also atheist.

He couldn't realistically object, didn't want to go to the army and didn't want to go to jail, too. So he waited...

He got sent his draft notice, passed the physical and got a letter telling him to report to X company under sergeant Y.

He wrote back a reply, on rose-colored paper, scented with perfume, about how much he was looking forward to serving under the strong leadership of Y, promising to obey every one of his orders, and that he can't wait to experience life in the barracks together with so many strong and muscular men.

He was declared unfit for service shortly after.

My dads side of the family grew up as New Hampshire hicks. My grandfather was st**bed in two different bar fights and burned down an entire country club because he thought they were too stuck up.

He was never caught and went on to earn a bronze and silver star in the Korean War, but unfortunately lost his leg too.

I thought I might add that my grandfather got his s**t together, started a successful small business and as a funny twist later joined that same country club as an old man. He never really felt welcome there my dad said though, they weren’t really his kind of people.

This was a couple of generations back (early 20th century) but there was this guy who was constantly getting drunk and harassing my great aunt. So, one of her male friends dressed up in an Easter Bunny outfit, put a bat in its giant fake carrot and beat the dude with it.


He got away with it but I'm sure it helped that half the community was waiting for the day the guy's liver finally gave out.


One small clarification - the bat in question was a baseball bat, not the flying mammal (though that's certainly an interesting visual and I can't say I'm sorry for my small role in creating that image).

My great uncle stole a train station.

Like an actual train station.

Bonus crime: He broke into a local police station to steal his own (paper) criminal record. Didn't destroy or steal any of the others. Just his own.

One of my great-uncles was highly involved in sanction busting for the apartheid state of Rhodesia. He worked for the "Netherlands Bank of Rhodesia" and was forced to stay and work through threats to his family by the minority government.


Luckily he managed to convince the government that his kids simply *must* have a British public-school education, and that his wife would escort them to London for the start of term. Whilst they were abroad they were taken into protective custody by the British government, and he managed to slip over one of the land borders to safety. He was flown back to the UK for debriefing and was kept in the country for a while.


He took up farming in the deepest and quietest bit of countryside he could find.

One time my uncle put ranch dressing on a dry-aged NY strip steak that cost 70$.

A member of my family once took part in an armed insurrection against the United States. He even led an army that was part of that insurrection.

The State of Virginia just removed his statue from the US Capitol building.

My Dad’s older brother came home from the war in Vietnam to find that his wife had been cheating on him with his best friend. He locked them both in the friend’s house and burned it down with them in it. He held the fire fighters off with a rifle until he was sure they couldn’t be saved, then he sh*t himself. This was before I was born, but I’ve seen some newspaper clippings about it.

EDIT: Several people asked how he kept them in the house alone. I asked my mother about it and she said that he locked them together in a small bedroom closet and barricaded the door from the outside so they couldn’t get out.

This was in the 1970s in New Orleans. I’m not gonna give more info as it’d be easy to tie back to me (same last name) or his daughter who was a little under two years old at the time, and I don’t want that.

My Dad brought in a Banana tree to the US from his home village in Kerala. He literally walked through customs with a tree in a pot in his arms. The customs lady asked him what he was thinking and he just replied that the banana tree was from his mother's garden. The customs lady must have thought my dad was crazy, but she just let him walk right through. We still have that tree and it's offspring.

A distant cousin got her terminally ill father to give her power of attorney and then stole all of his money so she wouldn't have to split it with her brother.

Don't worry, she did go to jail as her rush to clean him out involved a lot of fraud and forgery.

I worked at a movie theatre when Back To The Future was originally released. We used to take the entire movie ticket instead of tearing them and re-sell them to the next group coming in. The old theatre was massive. Sat 600 people. We probably made about $15k between two of us in month or so. Adjusted for inflation, it's about $37k. We were the richest high school kids in our town.