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#1
#2
My roommate and I used to eat lunch and shop where Bob had his shop. He was always very nice. I remember my roommate had pierced her own ear. It was a little red/inflamed. Bob noticed it and gave her some antiseptic to treat it. He told her, she needed to be careful or it would get infected. A week later we were at the Flea Market, for lunch, and noticed Bob’s shop was closed. Asked the person who had the next booth and they told us he’d been arrested. We were shocked when the details came out.
#3
regrettablyAnnoying:
Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker. I’m still affected by it.
Playful_Question538:
I remember Richard Ramirez the night stalker as a kid. When he got off of a bus back to LA he saw his picture on the newspaper he ran into a neighborhood and the locals kicked his a** and he got arrested. It was a scary time. Everyone started locking their doors. I can't believe we didn't before that but we didn't.
slimkermit1:
He had a fascination with brown and yellow houses. We lived in the same neighborhood as one of his victims. Guess what color our house was?!
The late 1970s and 1980s were a deeply troubling period in modern American history. Violent crime had risen sharply during the previous decades, while several high-profile serial violence cases captured national attention and created a widespread sense of fear.
For many people, these crimes felt especially unsettling because the victims were sometimes strangers to their killers, making the danger appear unpredictable and difficult to understand. Although these tragedies remained relatively rare compared with other forms of violent crime, the shocking nature of these cases (and the intense media coverage surrounding them) left a lasting impression on communities across the country.
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Law enforcement agencies across the country were working to identify and capture these offenders, but investigators often faced challenges that traditional policing methods were not designed to solve. Many homicide investigations began by examining familiar connections, such as family relationships, financial disputes, personal conflicts, or other possible motives. However, when victims appeared to have no obvious connection to one another, investigators had fewer leads to follow. In some cases, crimes committed in different cities or states were not immediately linked, making it even harder to recognize a pattern or determine whether the same offender was responsible.
#7
#8
Ancient-Ad-2474:
John Wayne Gacy used to pick up guys in a bar my mom bartended in. She told me he was picking up “trick boys”.
#9
I was a UF student the same age as the 5 victims, one of whom, Christa Hoyt, lived 2 streets over from me. I lived by myself in a small apartment building from the 1940s that sat at the end of a d**d-end road, backed up against the forest. The big, screenless windows in the apartment opened with a crank and had no lock. The rickety wooden staircase attached to side of the building led up to my door and was the only way in or out.
The other students in the building went home, and every night my mother would call me on the landline -- the only phone there was -- to beg me to do the same. "You're all alone there," she'd say, "He could be walking up your stairs right now. He could be crouched in those woods, waiting for you to hang up."
My poor mother. There was never any question that I would stay there. This was such an unusual situation that I saw it for what it was -- an unusual situation -- at the time, when normally you only understand that kind of thing in retrospect. But I knew that what was happening would be something people would be talking about long after it resolved itself, and I wanted to be there to see it.
The things I remember most from that period are:
Walking up to my completely empty classes in a completely empty town. I was a sophomore and was very very serious about my studies, so I had close relationships with my professors. Because I was only 18, it didn't strike me as weird that my teachers kept having "classes" even though I was the only one who showed up. It didn't occur to me that they kept having those classes BECAUSE I kept showing up. I wonder what they thought about me. About why I didn't go home. Didn't anyone love me?
I remember that, when I would show up to class, my professors and I would not talk about academics. Instead, they'd come sit in a student desk next to mine and we'd chain smoke cigarettes, which was a novel thing to do with a professor inside of a classroom. My religion professor brought in beer one day and we sat in the classroom and drank it until it was gone; my Russian professor, who had just moved to Gainesville from the USSR, brought his wife to class with us and she brought little pastries for us to eat. We sat in the classroom and ate pastries while they asked me to explain what was happening. Is this the kind of thing that goes on in America? Is this what you do?
I remember sitting in the Plaza of the Americas outside of the main library, normally a vibrant field of grass full of hackey-sack players and Hare Krishnas spooning out the free daily lunch. But each day as more and more bodies piled up the Plaza emptied of students and filled up with reporters and camera crews. I'd watch them as they scurried around, setting up their sh*ts, checking their levels, their makeup melting in the late August central Florida humidity.
The funniest thing about them was that, to a man, all of them would be dressed in a full suit coat and tie on their tops, but their bottoms would be Ocean Pacific surf shorts and flip flops. It was so funny to watch all of them jockeying for the best position in the Plaza, the best establishing sh*t, while completely ignoring the 50 other major media outlets doing exactly the same thing all around them.
It reminds me today of the YouTube videos I've seen of an underpass in a city in China, where influencer hopefuls line up by the hundreds with their ring lights, each in their own little bubble, each trying to out viral the other. The newscasters would approach me, one of the few students still sitting there, to ask me how I felt about my classmate's head being found on that bookshelf. Bad? Good? I'd respond the way I still do when someone asks me questions: with my own questions for them as a deflection and defense. Aren't you hot? Isn't this weird? Do you have a lighter?
I remember the building horror, the absolute terror that even I as a jaded and cynical punk rock teenager had to acknowledge of waking up in the morning to it happening again. And again. It was crazy, it was madness, the idea that something so bad had happened that we'd all be wishing to return to two days ago, when all we had was two bodies. We thought that was bad? We had no idea how good we all had it two days ago.
The thing I remember the most, though, was the pizza delivery guys. As the week wore on and the contours of the nightmare we were mired in became more clear, everyone who was left in town ran out and bought g*ns. What kind of g*ns? How many g*ns? Yes.
They bought all these g*ns and then brought them home and leaned them all around themselves like a teepee as they turned on the evening news and waited for the pizza they'd ordered to arrive. By the end of the epically horrible news update they'd forgotten everything, including the fact that they'd ordered a pizza, so when they heard the footsteps on the walkway outside, they did the only reasonable thing and threw open the front door and took that Gumby's or Five-Star man down.
In my memory, there were a total of eight pizza delivery guys who were k****d during the week it took them to charge the wrong man and falsely reassure us while the k**ler camped in a tent on the outskirts of town, playing his guitar and going to the Walmart to shop for victims. Eight innocent pizza guys, 3 more than the k**ler had claimed. But surely that can't be true. Eight pizza guys is a lot of pizza guys, and it was so long ago. So much of what happened is in there, but hazy.
There is a great deal of heartbreaking history from this era that shows how difficult these investigations could be. Detectives were often searching for clear motives and identifiable connections while trying to understand crimes that appeared deeply personal to the offender but made little sense to anyone else.
A major shift in the study of violent crime came through the work of FBI agents and researchers who began examining offenders’ behavior more closely. Their experiences were documented in several books. One of them was John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker’s Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, which explored the early development of behavioral analysis and criminal profiling.
#10
Something that might not be immediately obvious if you were not there at the time is that, in the window between Bundy's arrest and Ridgeway's arrest, there was this strange feeling that the ongoing m*rders could have been committed by anyone, even your neighbor, and you might not ever suspect them. Parents dealt with this in different ways. I was not allowed to walk certain places without a sibling, friend, or our very large dog. Our neighbors were not allowed within certain distances of houses their parents viewed as suspect. Parents posted themselves outside to track children trickling back to their houses at dusk. In this pre-cell phone era, we had to call every so often or if our plans changed, carrying quarters for the pay phones on our routes. And going downtown to loiter at the arcade or market required an actual chaperone in a time where chaperones of that sort were not common.
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Douglas and his colleagues believed that understanding an offender’s thoughts, behavior, and motivations could provide investigators with useful clues. Alongside FBI agent Robert Ressler and other researchers, the Behavioral Science Unit began interviewing incarcerated violent offenders to learn more about their backgrounds, fantasies, decision-making, and the circumstances surrounding their crimes. Their work initially faced skepticism, as many people questioned whether behavioral analysis could provide practical support to criminal investigations. Over time, however, the information gathered from these interviews helped researchers identify recurring patterns and develop new ways of examining crime scenes.
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As a young teen, I frequently walked to the local shopping center. I read in the paper that my usual path across the vacant lot along the golf course was one of the places where he had launched his attacks. I was freaked out by warnings and news stories. It was unreal when I found out that he had been arrested for these crimes. From my acquaintance of having him sit behind me, he struck me as a sort of light-hearted, not-dedicated student - not an exemplary honor student, but also not a predator of any sort.
He died relatively recently. Alums of my high school maintain a "memorial page" of people who attended or worked there, and each one has a little obituary. There was a great deal of discussion about whether he should be included. Some said, "he attended, he's d**d, so yes". Others were like, "he was a spectacularly bad person, and he should not be 'remembered'.".
One of the most well-known offenders interviewed during this period was Edmund Kemper, often referred to in the media as the “Co-ed Killer.” Kemper killed his paternal grandparents when he was a teenager and later killed several young women in California, as well as his mother and her friend. Many of his victims were college students who had been hitchhiking near Santa Cruz, which contributed to the nickname associated with his crimes. He was eventually arrested after turning himself in and was later sentenced to life in prison. His case remains one of the most disturbing examples examined by researchers because of the extreme violence involved and the insight he offered into his own behavior
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Hillside Stranglers just confirmed what we'd been taught about hitchhiking. Ramirez I was older and worked at the Licorice Pizza in Whittier on Whittier Blvd. First computer system I ever used. We rented videos at the time and someone had noted not to rent videos to Richard Ramirez. Do you have any idea how many guys are named Richard Ramirez in Whittier and La Habra??? But also we'd call each other and make sure everyone had their windows closed and locked.
#18
My older brother was friends with one of the boys who was kidnapped and m******d. The k**ler has still never been caught.
At the time, the area I lived in was on high alert. The police came to my school, took Polaroids of all of our faces and finger printed all of us for records. I remember my mom would never let me out of her sight.
Kemper was known for being highly intelligent and unusually willing to speak at length about his experiences. During interviews, he discussed the violent fantasies, resentment, and psychological patterns that had influenced his actions. These conversations did not excuse or explain away the harm he caused. Instead, they gave researchers an opportunity to study how an offender understood and described his own behavior. The interviews also helped reinforce the idea that violent offenders could leave behavioral clues through their choices, routines, interactions with victims, and actions at a crime scene.
#19
In the 1980s I took a business trip to San Fransciso, and on the flight there I read the book Zodiac (chilling and great).
My flight lands very late, I get a cab to my hotel, and as we approach the dropoff I see it's at the intersection where the Zodiac K**ler was known to have caught a cab.
At this point, mentally, I'm deeeep into the world of the Zodiac crimes and manhunt, it's just over a decade since the last known victim, it's late and dark and foggy with empty streets, and he's still not been caught.
To say my head was on a swivel that trip would have been an understatement.
***Second Incident***
I was hospitalized in eastern Pennsylvania, had surgery, and the night before I was to be released I developed severe, life-threatening complications, which I barely survived (got last rites, etc).
Over a decade later I find out that [Charles Cullen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Cullen) was working at my hospital while I was there. The nature of my complications could definitely have been caused by a malicious actor, and for a time I considered suing but, due to personal complications, ended up choosing not to pursue it.
#20
Even his girlfriend reported Ted as a possible suspect.