40 Innocent-Looking Photos That Hold Sinister Secrets

The picture of the Israeli Olympic Team marching in the opening ceremony of the 1972 Munich Olympics. They seem happy to be there and carefree. A week later, within the Olympic Village, 11 of them would be taken hostage by a terrorist group, Black September. In the end, a botched rescue attempt by the German authorities resulted in them all being m**dered (two had already died in the initial hostage taking).

2004 Tsunami nears John & Jackie Knill

John and Jackie Knill were k**led in the 2004 Tsunami. Their bodies were never found but their passports and camera were discovered and returned to their children. There are more pictures that show that something terrible is about to occur. But this one is nearly tranquil.

EDIT: Their bodies apparently were found.

This is the picture of two brothers named Michael and Sean McQuilken. This photo was taken on August 20th, 1975 in Sequoia National Park in California. A few seconds after this photo the pair were struck by lightning. They both survived but Sean took his own life in 1989.

Lillipout:

This is a famous incident. It occurred on August 20, 1975 at about 4:15pm at a place called Moro Rock in Sequoia National Park, California. Moro Rock is a granite outcrop 4000 feet above a river valley. Seven people were injured but there was only one fatality - a hiker who was practically still in the parking lot among 40-50 foot tall trees. The smaller boy was reportedly knocked unconscious, but revived with CPR. Several of the injuries were caused by flying rock. There's another image from that storm, but I'm unable to locate it. This incident was the subject of several lawsuits, including SCHIELER v. UNITED STATES where the plaintiff alleged that the Park Service was negligent in warning hikers about the dangers of lightning strikes and failing to employ safety devices. These types of lawsuits tend not to go anywhere, but today there is a warning sign advising hikers to descend and find cover if they experience piloerection.

This photo was found on a damaged camera that had gone through the washing machine at the home of Travis Alexander. The next few shots show Alexander bleeding on the bathroom floor, minutes after being attacked. The photos were taken by Jodi Arias, Alexander's girlfriend, and the one above just minutes before she stabbed and shot him.

"He sustained 27 st*b wounds, a slit throat, and a g*nshot wound to the head. Medical examiner Kevin Horn would later testify that Alexander's jugular vein, common carotid artery, and trachea had been slashed and that he had defensive wounds on his hands. Horn further testified that Alexander might have been dead at the time the g*nshot was inflicted and that the back wounds were shallow."

Columbine shooters. It's a picture of the entire class of 1999 prior to the shooting. In the top left corner you can see the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, aiming imaginary firearms at the camera.
Pretty chilling stuff.

Anon:

The weird thing about the Columbine photo is that literally, if the shooting hadn't happened, there would be absolutely nothing notable about this in the photo. My older brother (graduated the year before) had friends who did that as their "joke pose" too. I knew people in my h**h school ten years later who did the same.
But of course, with hindsight, and the fact that y'know, the shooters are the ones making that specific pose... creepy.

This is a photo of John Lennon giving an autograph to Mark David Chapman, the man who would m**der him only hours later. Chapman later said that he was incensed by Lennon's remark that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus", calling it blasphemy. He made no attempt to flee or resist arrest.

Not exactly "innocuous" but this photo was taken by Dean "Candy Man" Corll. It shows a struggling boy who he presumably r***d and m******d but nobody has been able to either find his body nor give him a name. He just exists in this piece of frozen time.

Demon Core

This is a recreation photo of an accident that occurred with the infamous "demon core". Physicist Louis Slotin was conducting an experiment to verify the exact point at which a subcritical mass of fissile material could be made critical by the positioning of neutron reflectors. Basically, the two half spheres would be adjusted around the core and the core activity would be measured.

The risk was that if the spheres were allowed to close, the core would instantaneously form a critical mass. To keep them from closing, he pried the top core up with a s***w driver. Unfortunately the s***w driver slipped, a critical mass formed, and (near) instantly gave him a lethal dose of radiation. He shielded the other people in the room and was the only fatality.

DaughterEarth:

Stuff like this is why we have safety regulations today. We rarely come up with them before an accident, at least not traditionally. We're getting better now, and accounting for this kind of potential in a design is drilled in to engineering students heads, but yah, not always like that.
However, yah, I agree, should have been clear even then that showboating is a bad idea.

Two friends posted this selfie on Facebook. Later that night the girl on the left strangled her friend with the belt she is wearing in the photo.
Cheyenne Antoine claims she has no memory of strangling her friend Brittney Gargol after a night of heavy drinking. However, Gargol’s body was found next to the belt Antoine is wearing in this photo. Antoine pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to seven years in prison.

orangestar17:

Strangled her to death, left her on the side of the road by a landfill, and she'll be out of prison still in her 20s.

Four year old girl slipped to the bottom of the bed and was wedged between mattress and tucked in duvet. Police took a picture of the bedroom on the morning of her disappearance which shows the bulge in the duvet, but only discovered the body nine days later. It is something that has stuck with me - could she have been alive in this photo?

Smokin-Okie:

She wasn't under her mattress though, she was in a small gap at the foot of her bed between the frame and the matress.
It's really not as suspicious as it sounds, she had a very large bed either full or queen size canopy platform bed (which was unsuitable for any four year old, especially one with disabilities). It was so h**h from the floor that if Paulette fell out she would have been hurt and she moved a lot in her sleep, so her nannies would place two large body pillows under the covers with to keep her from rolling off. They created a little tunnel directly to the area at the foot of her bed where her body was found. Her bed was made by tightly tucking all the cover under her matress at the foot of her bed, when Paulette got wedged down there she was stuck in a pocket where she fell asleep sucking on her fingers and suffocated. Police did a recreation with a girl around Paulette's size showing how easily she could have rolled into the space. They checked under her bed but because the matress was sitting on a platform they could not see her body. They brought in a dog to track her sent, they pulled the flat pink sheet (the one seen in the above photo laying over the pillows) off her bed and used it as a reference scent, the dog immediately lead its handler to Paulette's bed but was redirected because they thought the dog was leading them to the source of the refrence scent. After her body was discovered they checked the sheet (which had been removed the morning she was discovered missing and kept in an evidence bag) they found a large urine stain in the same spot Paulette's pubic region was and a smaller stain in the area her nose and mouth were, the same stains were found on the fitted sheet. Also, the corner blankets and the lower part of the matress where her head was resting were soaked in decomposition fluid. On the third day of the investigation the family were removed from the house, no one checked Paulette's bedroom until the night she was discovered, when police entered the room they could smell her decomposing body. It was almost immediately annouced that Paulette's death was a homicide, but after the initial autopsy and the discovery on the flat sheet removed the morning she was reported missing they asked the United States FBI to help conduct the investigation, 3 other Mexican investigating agencies joined in. 5 different agencies all came to the same conclusion: Paulette accidentally suffocated in her bed the night before she was reported missing and decomposed in that area without being moved.

This selfie of Tyler Hadley at the party his parents forbade him to throw... So he k**led them and threw the party anyway. This photo was taken while they were dead in their bedroom after being bludgeoned to death.

"Tyler decided how he wanted to commit the m**ders a few weeks prior to committing them. He ostensibly told a friend exactly what he was planning to do at that time - stating that having a big party after a parricide had "never been done before." Shortly after noon Tyler wrote on his Facebook wall, "party at my crib tonight...maybe."

After Tyler's parents returned home that day, he hid their phones and locked their black Labrador (who he suspected would defend his parents) in a closet.

Shortly before 5:00 p.m. on the evening of July 16, 2011, Tyler took three pills of e*****y and then stood behind his mother, Mary-Jo, as she worked on her computer in the family room. He attacked his mother with the back-end of a claw hammer first. Hearing the screams, his father rushed out of the bedroom to see what was happening. Blake saw Tyler attacking his mother and froze at the sight, exclaiming "Why?" Tyler replied, "Why the f**k not?" before fatally attacking his father with the hammer. After m*******g them, he dragged their bodies into the master bedroom and spent three hours cleaning up the blood and throwing household items that reminded him of them on top of their bodies."

Musician Jeff Buckley (right), hours before he died from accidental drowning at the age of 30 in 1997.

AtBat3:

Great singer-songwriter whose debut album was phenomenal. He took a swim in a river with steel toe boots on and no one was really keeping an eye on him, next thing you know they couldn’t find him. Got caught under a current from a passing boat I think. Just a tragic accident nothing suspicious about it. It just sucks.

MissSassifras1977:

I would like to add that this is a terrible picture of Jeff. He was very handsome. His looks were nothing compared to his talent.
He was beloved to his family. He was friendly with his ex's and in love with a beautiful girl when he died.
So what happened to Jeff?
He was just in to town to record some music. It was late at night. He decided to jump in the river for a swim.
It was a single roadie keeping an eye on him. The guy was moving some equipment and took his eyes off Jeff for just a few minutes.
He was singing a zeppelin song (idk which) as he swam. Then he was gone, dragged under the water by the wake from a passing barge or tugboat.
His wiki and every article I've ever read said nothing about steel toe boots.
One moment he was there, the next gone. His body was found days later, miles away. The world mourned. Artists from every genre paid tribute to him.
Jeff was completely sober when he died. And he was happy. It wasn't s*****e, it was foolishness.
It was all just a cluster f**k of bad decisions that ended in a very tragic accident. 💙

This home video of Jeffrey Dahmer, casually saying to his dad that he should eat at home more often. However, at the time this video was filmed, Jeffrey already k**led 7 men (and ate some of their body parts).

This is John du Pont and Dave Schultz.

John (The man on the bottom) hosted a massive wrestling team where all of the athletes lived on the grounds. Schultz was hired to coach the team.

As time went on John started to act stranger than normal (He was already very odd). He started to think his friend Schultz was spying on him. He believed that Schultz was hiding in his walls spying and plotting to k**l him. It seems to me like John was a paranoid schizophrenic.

Eventually John snapped. He drove up to Schultz's home and shot him in front of his family. Schultz died moments later.

This photo of Bart Whitaker (left) and his brother. Bart k**led his brother and his mother and attempted to k**l his father.

sydofbee:

To be fair, he did not actually k**l them himself. He hired a h****n and asked him to hurt him too, so that it wouldn't be obvious it was an attack orchestrated by him. I think that even makes it worse because there was quite a bit of thought behind it; it wasn't a passion k**ling if you will.

BlessedBreasts:

This story k**ls me. I saw an interview with the father and he'd lost everything. His children, his love, and his hope. He told the interviewer that he would be attending his son's e*******n (should he receive the DP, not sure if he got it) because that was his son...that he'd been there when he took his first breath and would be there beside him when he left the world. the love of parents, omg. And yes, his hand gesture was a joke. He said that later, that it was in reference to their planned deaths and how they could kiss his a*s, etc.

You may never have heard of Pogo the Clown, pictured above, but when the paint comes off he was better known as John Wayne Gacy, serial k*ller and r*pist in the 1970s. When he wasn't appearing as a clown at children's birthday parties, Gacy was s*xually a*s*ulting and m**dering over 30 young males in just over 6 years. He became known as "The K**ler Clown" and was sentenced to death in 1980.

This picture was taken by a passenger of the Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 on July 17th 2014. He posted this picture on his Facebook, saying; 'if it goes missing, this is what it (the plane) looks like.' Referring to another Malaysian Airlines plane (flight MH370) that went missing on March 8th 2014. Later that day the plane the man boarded was taken down by a missile fired by either Russia or Ukraine.

RealHorrorShowvv:

I still don't understand why they thought it would have been a good idea to fly over that zone.

apple_kicks:

Planes fly over war zones a lot and usually the radar and the height they are at identifies them as passengers (as some said st the time) . Leaked radio chatter revealed the soldiers thought the same that it would be no fly zone. They had been shooting down Ukrainian military planes earlier that month.

This photo depicts members of the Heaven's Gate cult who, in March of 1997, were convinced to commit s**cide by leader Marshall Applewhite. They believed Earth was about to be wiped out and that s*****e was necessary to escape and reach an alien spaceship that was traveling behind the Hale-Bopp comet.

united_shirts:

Heaven's Gate was an American new religious movement, often described as a cult. It was founded in 1974 and led by Bonnie Nettles (1927–1985) and Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997), known within the movement as Ti and Do respectively. Nettles and Applewhite first met in 1972, and went on a journey of spiritual discovery, identifying themselves as the two witnesses of Revelation, attracting a following of several hundred people in the mid 1970s. In 1976, the group stopped recruiting and instituted a monastic lifestyle. Scholars have described the theology of Heaven's Gate as a mixture of Christian millenarianism, New Age, and Ufology, and as such it has been characterised as a UFO religion. The central belief of the group was that followers could transform themselves into immortal extraterrestrial beings by rejecting their human nature, and they would ascend to heaven, referred to as the "Next Level" or "The Evolutionary Level Above Human". The death of Nettles to cancer in 1985 challenged the group's views on ascension, where they originally believed that they would ascend to heaven while alive aboard a UFO, later coming to believe that the body was merely a "container" or "vehicle" for the soul, and that their consciousness would be transferred to new "Next Level bodies" upon death.

The most sinister wink of all time.

Context: This photo was taken just after LBJ was sworn in on Air Force One, immediately following the m**der of JFK. In the foreground you'll notice Jackie Kennedy visibly grieving the loss of her husband. LBJ turned towards his longtime friend, Texas congressman Albert Thomas, who gave him a surreptitious wink and a smile. White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, who took the photo, said it could have been "innocent or sinister, and I would have leaned towards the latter." The man in charge of Air Force One at the time, General Godfrew McHugh later said LBJ's behavior on the plane was "obscene."

Edit: Took out a line about blood spatter on Jackie's coat, since people seemed to be really concerned about it. Though there was blood on her coat at the time the photo was taken, it's not in the frame.

The story goes that the picture was taken of the man on the edge goofing off with a fishing pose, but only later when the film was developed, that a boy/young man was shown behind him, unbeknownst to the guy on the edge or the photographer.

Several theories have been made about what the heck was exactly going on, some innocuous, some not, but to me it's such a creepy picture.