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Just like how you can never predict your next scroll, you never really know what goes on behind the closed doors of your neighbor's home. Similarly, you can never get inside someone else's head and know what they're thinking and what kind of person they really are. You can only go by what they show you, and some people are very good at going through life with a mask on.
Yet, sometimes that mask slips off, and some terrifying secrets might spill out. These are the stories about people who seemed perfectly ordinary to those who knew them, but were, in reality, awful people. They come to you from a thread where a netizen asked: "What are your 'he seemed so normal' stories?"
Trigger warning: some stories include disturbing violence, so proceed at your own risk.
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#1
This guy used to deliver pizza to me every week for 2 years. After cops find my wife's torso in the garage the guy stops bringing pizzas. I swear I was a good tipper. He seems so normal.
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#2
I was the manager at a sandwich place that was in a very bad neighborhood. One of the highest crime areas in the country. I was never too concerned, though, because we were directly across the street from a police station.
We had one regular customer who came in 2-3 times a week. He didn't look anything like 90% of our customers. He was middle aged, clean cut, always in a long sleeve button-up shirt and tie. He said he was a teacher and talked about his students, and all the great things he did for them. Honestly, I would have said he was a hero...
Then one day, he walked into the restaurant with a g*n in his right hand, and he was crying his eyes out. He was babbling a little bit, and just bawling. He walked up to the cashier, who hadn't had a chance to move away, pointed the g*n straight at her, paused, then pointed the g*n at himself and attempted to pull the trigger, but dropped the g*n instead. A customer tackled him, and a group of us made sure he stayed on the ground, and the police came and took him away pretty quickly thereafter.
We came to later find out that he had discovered his wife had cheated on him with one of his students, and he had k****d her about 10 minutes before he came into the restaurant.
Most intense part was actually right when he walked in, believe it or not. Even more intense than him pointing the g*n at the cashier. I had just pulled money from her drawer and was walking towards the back of the store where the safe was when I heard the chime that the door had opened. My back was to the door when I heard it, and looked back over my shoulder to see who had come in. I IMMEDIATELY saw the g*n, and knew that things were about to get really bad.
#3
When I was a kid growing up in Maryland we had a neighbor named Walt. Walt taught me how to fish and how to catch Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs off the pier behind our house. He was always happy to look after me when my folks were busy and he had a pretty impressive fish tank in his place. Every day after school I would stop by to see him and he would let me feed his fish.
I learned a lot from Walt, but what I didn't learn until 20 years later was that Walt was legally blind.
Edit: For those who keep bringing up the fact that "legally blind" doesn't necessarily mean "blind," Walt's eyesight had been deteriorating for years, and there were definitely signs that I would have seen had I not been a naive six year old. However, he maintained his independence the entire time I knew him, only relying on others for the occasional lift into town.
#4
My school photographer--an independent guy, no LifeTouch stuff--was a pretty normal, funny guy. He'd always make small talk while taking the photos and they always turned out really nicely.
well, one year the photos were awfully late coming back to us and it turns out he'd hanged himself.
it was pretty sad.
#5
I suppose he really wasn't "normal" to me, but my father-in-law tried to m****r my mother-in-law. My husband's whole family thought he was just socially awkward and goofy. I thought he was creepy as f*****g hell and something was wrong with him. They started their divorce and I told my husband 20 times they should get a restraining order and how f*****g creepy the s**t he was doing was. He kinda brushed it off and said he's been like that for 30 years. A few months later the man tried st**bing my MIL to d***h. She is ok now and he is in jail for a long time, but seriously. that was f*****g weird. THEY thought he was just being his 'normal'.
To top it off, the man worked at a retail store in town. He totally lied about tons of s**t and everyone felt bad for HIM and sent him get well cards in the mail (He tried to run and flipped his car on the highway). Someone even commented on the newspaper website that the wife "probably drove him to do it". I was f*****g PISSED.. She is a totally nice funny person. He was a whack job that smoked too much w**d.
Side note: Father-in-law (I don't even like calling him that because I never want to see him again) had the same name as my husband. We legally changed his last name :-) so did his brother.
#6
This seems to be appropriate...
I kid you not, LAST NIGHT, a friend and her mother were sh*t and k****d in her house down the road from me. The culprit? Her father.
The girl was a track star, and a great girl with a promising future. Very friendly and compassionate. Life taken short by her father.
I found out this morning and couldn't believe it. Her dad seemed like such a good guy.
EDIT: I've been asked how I knew so quickly it was him. If there was a trial and he was found guilty and s**t. The answer is no... He then k****d himself. I suppose I may be wrong and he didn't do it and it's just a strange coincidence, butttt I doubt it.
#7
One of the teachers at my little sister's elementary school was sh*t and k****d by her husband who turned the g*n on himself seconds later. The worst part? They were having a pretty heated argument in their driveway and about 5 of their neighbors who came out to see what the fuss was all about witnessed the m****r/s*****e.
Everyone thought he was a totally normal guy.
#8
The Santa at my parent's work Christmas party.
*He m******d women and put their bodies in barrels.*
Here's his Wiki.
#9
Kid on my DI team in middle school never cut his f*****g toenails. Super nice kid, a little awkward. Wound up beating his mom with a baseball bat to d***h with his sister and then fleeing to New Mexico.
Edit: we knew his mom (not too well), she would always freak out over her kid staying over late to work on stuff. He seldom wore shoes. Then he would walk home at the end of the night because his mom refused to drive him home. Also, his sister wanted to get married and asked her mom, she said no, she started to beat the mother with a bat a couple minutes later and the little brother started in by pushing her down the stairs. The sister, the boyfriend and the kid fled to New Mexico.
#10
Local politician seemed like a decent guy. As decent as a politician can be.
Turns out he hired a dominatrix to throw up cupcakes on him after she drank milk. She couldn't handle how weird it was and how needy he was so she quit.
He couldn't handle it and sh*t her boyfriend in front of her and then himself.
#11
My grandma k****d her sister. She was just my grandma before that - kind of a harda*s to me then (later I realized it was sociopathy), but still just an old Southern lady that cooked an awesome cornbread every Sunday.
#12
When I was in elementary school I had this happy, hippy art teacher. She was very fun and nice, like she had clay jar with a cork top that said "fairy dust" on it that was full of glitter. She would sprinkle it on our heads on the way out of the classroom. Eventually she left because she had cancer. Years later, I guess she couldn't take it so she went to a gas station, covered herself in gas and lit herself on fire. She actually k****d herself there at the gas station around all of those people...
#13
I had a substitute teacher in high school that was always really nice and got along with all the kids. He was even cool enough to let us have class on the roof of the school (accessible by a window).
It just came out recently that he tried to k**l his wife by shoving her off a cliff in Maine. He did it to try and get her money that she had recently inherited.
Made me second guess all the time I spent on the roof with him.
#14
My girlfriends primary school teacher was always gathering money to help children in 3rd world countries. a few years later they suddenly got a substitute teacher, it turned out they found out his entire hard drive was filled with images and videos of him having s*x with small african children.
Turned out he used the money he gathered from the students to pay for the plane tickets to get there.
#15
My parents were coworkers and pretty good friends with Bobbie Joe Long for years, up until the cops caught him. He and my dad would drive to the bank every Thursday to pick up their checks then go out for a beer afterwards.
My dad tells a story about how one time he was looking for a pen to sign his check while in Bobbie Joe's car and went to open the glove compartment only to have Bobbie Joe quickly shove his hand away. I guess this is where he would keep the underwear of his victims.
**TL;DR parents were good friends with a serial r*pist/m******r accused of k*****g over 10 people**.
#16
When I was in junior high I was in the Boy Scouts, late 1980's. A new kid joined our troop and he lived near me so we hung out. His dad was an ob/gyn and former air force officer. I always had wanted to be in the AF and his son did too. We used to practice our first aid and such over there and they seemed like such a normal family.
Over time we lost contact with each other. Then while in high school the father is arrested and is in the local paper. Ends up the father had been s******y as***lting his patients for years. The son ended up leaving the area, but I did see his graduation pic from West Point so at least he made it through.
#17
One of the teachers at my school (~26 years old) st*bbed his 16-year old girlfriend dozens of times, doused her in gasoline, tried to set her on fire, then tried to run her over with his car and finally k****d himself by crashing into a tree at 80 mph. This was a year and a half ago.
Another teacher was sent to prison a few months ago for stalking and attempting to poison one of his colleagues.
**TLDR**: Great school.
#18
Growing up I had a friend who lived across the street in our upper-middle class neighborhood. Her dad owned a protein shake and supplement shop in our town, and one day he was arrested for producing and distributing date-r**e d***s in the back room of the store. It also came out that her mother was a s******r at the local club.
In retrospect, after all this came out, I remembered a time that we were hanging out, and my friend had a bag of rock candy. (It was legit rock candy, not sketchy stuff) She offered me some saying, "Try this candy! It makes women lose their minds."
Weird sayings like that go in one ear and out the other until something like "Date r**e daddy" happens.
#19
This didn't exactly happen to me, but it's a story my mom told me. So my mom was quite close to her aunt and uncle along with their three kids. Throughout her childhood, she had a great relationship with her aunt's children (girl, boy, girl) and remembers a lot of fond memories of them. When the boy was in college, he apparently had no friends and lived very isolated. One day he ran away and they found him literally four states away living like a homeless guy. Apparently, he was and always had been a paranoid scizophrenic. My mom then remembered all the "signs" over the years like how he'd randomly mutter gibberish and start laughing to himself and how he'd be really poorly dressed all the time. After a while, he was healed, and I ended up meeting him at a family gathering years later. He seemed normal and even remembered who I was and we talked. Then, we found out that he went crazy again, left for like a month, and was admitted to a psychiatric facility. Apparently, he thinks his parents, the nicest people I've ever met, are his mortal enemies and can't be anywhere near them without attempting m****r.
EDIT: Kind of unrelated, but this occurred during all this crazy stuff. Apparently, before skipping town the first time, my uncle owned shares of a fairly large company, Infosys, and was a Ph.d. candidate. He ended up getting tortured and beaten up out of the shares (legit story) but no one believed him because they thought he was crazy. Later on, they found out the truth. He could've been a millionaire!
#20
My lawyer sh*t himself in the head in front of his wife who just had a baby. This happened a week before my disposition.
#21
My ex stepmother is a complete moron who made friends with a s*x offender. She didn't know it at the time, but I thought he was creepy as f**k.
He ended up trying to come on to her when she was d*****d up from being at the hospital for something.. Obviously they aren't friends anymore. Later I learned that he went through the panties and bras in my room when I was gone. ...Well, it could have been worse. ._.
#22
I'm from a small town in California, major crime is pretty rare. I worked at a veterinary clinic and this family used to bring there two dogs in pretty frequently because they didn't get along very well and would often get into fights. The last time I saw this family, one dog had ripped a hole in the other dog's ear. The wife brought the dog in and kept apologizing for the blood splatter on our walls from the dog shaking its head.
Several weeks later, the husband shot his wife and then k****d himself in their home. Crazy s**t.
#23
For a period of my life I was living next door to Elizabeth Smart's abductor, and even watched the America's Most wanted episode about the situation during the time she was literally next door to me.
edit: I was looking into the time frame and she never lived in the house; however David Mitchell did stop by that property multiple times when they were living in the woods by point of the mountain though.
#24
Not as severe as the other examples, but back when I was in marching band in high school, our assistant director was pretty cool. He had graduated from the school like 8 years earlier and was totally chill (to contrast the director himself, who was known for having a bit of a temper). Everyone called him 'mom' as a joke and he was just a cool dude, there was talks about him maybe taking over the middle school band program eventually.
Like a year or two after I graduated, turns out he had been stealing money from the band program's fundraising, to the tune of a few thousand. Not wanting to ruin this guy's life, though, the director just kicked him out and told him to get his act together. A few years later, he was arrested for stealing another couple thousand from multiple band programs in the state.
#25
This isn't my regular account.
This story involves two friends, one male one female. The male is a fellow redditor, hence the alternative account.
Summer of last year, Male started talking to Female. Being that Female was our mutual friend, I started to make friends with Male. We get along well. We both reddit, we share athletic interests, we both like similar videogames, et cetera.
Fastforward a couple weeks, Female comes to me distraught. She tells me to cut ties with Male. I ask why, I don't want to throw away a new friend for nothing. She tells me Male has a habit of showing up unexpectedly at her house at 3 A.M., as well as finding ways into her house (he surprised her once in there).
She also noted how he would stalk and follow her around town (without permission), he staked her out at her job once. She also claimed he has the wrong idea about their relationship, saying he wants her to be his girlfriend although she already has a S.O. (He even wanted to make it "Facebook official")
...
It sounds a lot worse when Female explains it.
#26
I had an awesome art teacher through almost all of high school, everyone loved and trusted him and one day he told the whole class he had a lot of leftover clay he wanted to use and instead of the normal give everyone a slab of clay and some time then see what they did with it, he told us he would make clay molds of all of us, a few minutes later we were all covered in clay with the only thing preventing us from suffocating being an air tube he gave us, he then takes our air tubes away and fills in the gap with clay, everyone breaks out of the clay (It was still very soft) and we pinned him down and told everyone, he eventually gets arrested for 50 counts of attempted m****r and his lawyer says he was insane, he is taken to a psychologist who diagnoses him as a paranoid schizophrenic, he now lives in a mental hospital.
tl;dr
Awesome art teacher tries to k**l me and 49 other students, gets arrested, discovered to be a paranoid schizophrenic, now lives in mental hospital.
Elladine DesIsles 25 minutes ago
This makes absolutely zero sense, if you try to think through an actual timeline of how this scenario would have played out.
#27
In junior high one of our classmates k****d herself, there was announcement/assembly in her regards. After the principal said who it was and expressed his concerns, the vast majority of the class whispered amongst themselves, "who?". I checked my previous yearbooks after that had happened only to find out that she was in my math class. feels bad man.
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