People Are Sharing the Most Messed Up Drama's From Their Small Towns

A man in the town I grew up in had a.. certain fondness for prostitutes. He was a pig farmer who’d had a very troubled childhood and eventually took over the family farm.

I guess pig farming wasn’t super fun, him and his brother neglected that part of the business and registered a non-profit charity. They regularly threw huge parties featuring prostitutes and the local biker gang. Nothing shady about that, right?

They got into some trouble a year or so later, when one of the brothers handcuffed and tried to murder one of his guests. She escaped, pressed charges. There was some issue with the property being zoned for farmland and used for other business, which authorities didn’t care for.

Police started getting more involved in the following years. The charity was shut down. A worked on the farm happened to notice that women who visited the farm ended up missing..

Police got a warrant to search the property for illegal firearms. While there, they found some.. strange items, and obtained a second warrant to search the property in accordance with the “BC Missing Women Investigation”.

Did you know that pigs will eat basically anything? Long story short, Mr. Pickton, the older brother and star of our story, had a habit of inviting women to his property, murdering them and feeding them to his pigs. And not just a couple, he ultimately confessed to 49 murders, but was only charged for 27.

His sentence is life in prison with potential for parole after no less than 25 years. It’s strongly suspected that he butchered the woman-eating pigs and sold their meat to the community.

Username: Moarisa

I used to live above a pub in London for around 2 years when I was around 18 as they allowed you to pay less rent if we also worked behind the bar part time. Was a really good deal until we got a new guy in one of the rooms in the other side of the pub than mine, he was the laziest and weirdest guy I had ever met and would smoke weed consssttantly out his window and barely speak other than awkward grunts and nods.

Anyway he was also terrible at working behind the bar so eventually he was asked to leave by the owners. He literally just walks out as soon as they ask him to go and never returns.

I was asked if I minded helping clean his room and getting it sorted for the next person, so I go in and its as expected just the biggest shithole ever, weed and cigarette butts everywhere, spilled stuff all over the place, some weird looking stain on the walls, loads of cups and cutlery just everywhere, old food just scattered over the floor, but it was the smell that hit me the most.

It smelt like something had died in there, like just that smell of putrid horribleness that makes you instantly gag. I ran downstairs and said to the owners I’m going to need some help as I can’t stand that smell for too long.

Anyway they come up and we try and work out what it is that smells so bad, but we just can’t find anything, the room just all seems to smell THAT bad without any actual source (it’s a one room apartment, toilets and kitchens shared down the hall). We open the window, plug in an air freshener and leave it for a few hours hoping it gets better.

Anyway we come back, it’s a bit better but the smells still there so we hope it’ll just get better as we clean. It doesn’t. We then notice the carpet seems to be pulled up a bit in the corner of the room, we pull the carpet back and see it looks like he’s literally pulled up a few of the floorboards, we pull them back and see what’s been making the smell.

Turns out this guy had literally been shitting and pissing under the floor boards the entire time he was there, the space beneath was about a half a metre or something and it was piled high with old shits. We spent about an hour taking it in turns to try and remove it but it was literally just one solid clump by this point and they called professional cleaners in the end. Anyway yeah, that smell and image traumatises me still to this day.

Username: Cranstorm

In my Catholic high school, there was a combination remedial math teacher /football coach/baseball coach, who we will call Coach Spanky. His teaching style consisted of handing out worksheets and then sitting in the front of the class reading the newspaper.

(For younger Redditors, “newspapers” were large pieces of paper that were folded together and contained mis-informed stories of local and/or national interest, sports, advice columns, comics and op/ed pages with righteously indignant ramblings...plus a crossword.)

My senior year, Coach Spanky suddenly stopped showing up to work in mid-February. A few days later, he was on the front page of one of those newspapers. As it turns out, he was a running a sports book as a side gig and got busted.

The arrest took a few interesting turns. First, the book was set up quite simply: just an answering machine in a second apartment the teacher had rented. People would call in and place bets on the tape. However, the apartment was about 20 miles away and across state lines, so federal law came into play.

Second, LE found out about the book several months earlier but purposely waited until Super Bowl Week to make the arrest. Prosecutors used the Super Bowl Week bets as the basis for ALL estimates/averages regarding how much money the teacher had made all along from his book.

So that one week of tape from Super Bowl bets was used to determine how much Coach Spanky owed in back taxes, penalties for illegal betting, etc and inflated his charges. Third, when LE knocked on Coach Spanky’s door with a warrant to arrested him, his son who was a football star in the same high school, decided to grab a gun to get the police to back off. Thankfully, the police talked him down.

Coach Spanky’s spent a few years in prison. Nothing really happened to his son, because the rumor was, the prosecutors held it over Coach Spanky’s head, telling him they wouldn’t charge his son if Coach pled guilty to the gambling charges. Well, “nothing happened” isn’t entirely accurate: his son died as a very young man from melanoma, just a few years after Coach got out of prison.

Username: nervemiester

My sister's boyfriend's mother catfished guys using her underage daughter's photos, pretending to be a young Russian woman in order to cheat on her husband, who was battling throat cancer.

We caught her doing it because me, my mom, my sister and her boyfriend were out on the front garden talking, for some reason it's where we always talked about stuff. It was summer and the sky had just begun to get dark. Suddenly a car pulls up next door and SB, sister's boyfriend, asks him if he's lost, because it's a dead end.

Guy says no he's waiting for someone, a second passes and SB realises the guy is pulled up outside his family home. He asks who he's waiting for and the guy tells him he's waiting for Natasha. SB is thinking this dude is a pedo who's been talking to his little sister, and is about to attack him when out comes his mom dressed in extremely revealing clothing.

She stops, looks at all of us and asks the guy if they can go. SB stops the guy and tells him that's his mom, her name's not Natasha, she's married to his dad who's battling cancer, asks his mom what the fuck she's doing.

She just stares at us, a few seconds of silence before she says "I am no (insert real name here) I am Natasha from mother Russia" in the WORST attempt at a Russian accent I have ever heard in my entire life. Like, was she trying to convince us all, who'd known her for years, and seen her come out of her home, that she wasn't who we know she was? It was so fucking stupid.

Anyway, the guy left, weirded out, and "Natasha" got mad at us for stopping her cheating on her cancer-ridden husband. We only found out later that she'd been pretending to be her underage daughter, around 13 at the time. She looked absolutely nothing like her daughter, so I can only imagine what that guy must have been thinking.

Username: GemoDorgon

Lived in a seedy apartment complex for about 5 years. Most of the time it was perfectly fine and only occasional, more ordinary, drama.

There were 4 units to a building, two upstairs two down, and each with private entry. We were in our mid 20s and lived on the bottom right. A couple nearing their 60s lived in the top left and had a daughter our age. The daughters boyfriend got into dealing drugs, stealing cars, and theft in general. That on its own caused enough drama to have cops show up to the building once every few months.

One time, I happened to be home in the middle of the day when this lady came frantically banging on our door screaming, fire! I ran outside and saw the exterior siding of the back of the bottom left apartment was on fire. I ran around front and told another neighbor to call 911, ran inside and grabbed my fire extinguisher, and managed to actually put out the fire.

We found out over the next coming weeks, that the lady had some huge fight with the daughter and boyfriend that ended with boyfriend holding old lady at gun point while the daughter ransaked the place and robbed them blind. After the boyfriend and daughter left, the lady somehow got it in her mind that if she burned the apartment building down, she could make an insurance claim and recoup all her losses

She originally claimed the boyfriend set the fire and was only caught after she moved out of our building into a different complex where she was caught on camera trying to do the same thing, in the same way, with the same accelerants and everything.

Also, one of the apartment managers ended up dating a literal nazi, got addicted to meth, became a prostitute, and went on a city wide crime spree before fleeing the state with her nazi boyfriend in a mobile meth lab where they eventually became involved in a high speed chase that ended in a fight with the cops.

She did a couple years time out of state, then was returned to the original state to do time for her crimes there, then released and, so far as we know, straight back to her nazi boyfriend and life of crime. Really though, it was a nice place.

Username: Arammil1784

Joined a Viking Age reenactment group similar to the SCA. The meetings were held at Neil Fakename’s house. He was married to Amanda. My husband and I ended up falling on hard times and moved into one of their spare rooms after a year or so of being in the group.

Amanda was in an accident when she was a child which left her mentally delayed. She had “episodes” where she was a literal 8 year old, usually when she was feeling a negative emotion or extreme excitement. She was mentally and physically able otherwise however and had a full time job.

One of the other Vikings members, Sam, had a sister who was in need of a place to stay so she as well moved in. Sister, Sue, was an ex an ex heroine addict who was using methadone. We were all happy she was trying to get off the heroine and we did what we could to get her on her feet again.

Neil did a little too much. He began spending ridiculous amounts of money on her and began a romantic relationship with her. My husband and I were suspicious of this but didn’t have real proof. Amanda was also suspicious. She had somehow found out about the affair and the following ensued:

She stood in the middle of the living room while Neil, us and almost the whole Viking group was watching a movie and having a beer. She proceeded to scream as loud as she could, head back, right at the ceiling. She slowly pointed at Neil and Sue who were sitting on folding chairs near each other and just yelled “DISHONEST!” (Which, fair. It was.) and ran to the bathroom and locked herself in.

It sounded like a bull in a china shop. We all just sat there in stunned silence listening to her literally destroy their bathroom and then it all went suspiciously quiet except for some grunting here and there.

After some time she burst out of the bathroom and ran down the hall, full force, into their room and sounded like she crash landed on the bed and continued screaming wordlessly. Neil went to see the damage to the bathroom; it wasn’t as broken as we thought, but she was on her period and had written obscenities and drawn/smeared the blood all over literally everything. Among the blood smears was also, of course, feces. (Because why not, right?)

She ended up moving out, and so did we cause that was terrifying and awkward. He and Sue got married, divorced after a year. Then he married a literal 19 year old child (he was in his 50s and looked like the crypt keeper due to lack of self care for 30 years.

He’d admit he hadn’t brushed his teeth in that long). Her parents were ok with it. They divorced a couple years later, because he cheated on her with another 19 year old and then got terminal cancer and passed away last year.

Username: Gregthepigeon

I lived a year or two in this small town in Washington. They loved their High School football, and the Marine ROTC class there had a 30 some year tradition of firing a cannon when the team made a touchdown. The metal shop class in the '80's made the second cannon.

This one kid wants to be a Marine Special Forces guy and gets the honor of being the cadet who fires the cannon at these games one year. Only this game, the cannon explodes spectacularly. Five people injured, shrapnel everywhere... but the absolute worst is the kid firing it nearly loses his leg.

Minor fucked up drama: Had this happened to one of the football players, they had the ability to airlift that person to the big hospital in Seattle, and they would have at least delayed the game if not stopping it right there. But an ROTC cadet? They put him in the back of an ambulance and the game kept going.

Major fucked up drama: After the game some of the more... slack-jawed... members of the football loving community realize that the story about some ROTC cadet whose dreams of serving overseas in the Marines being dashed by nearly losing his leg might be a bad enough look that it would mean that \*gasp\* \*horrors\* they might lose the blessed tradition of their precious touchdown cannon.

They blamed the kid, blamed the victim. Spread stories that it was all his fault. Sent threats and hate mail to the hospital, to his family. ("don't talk to reporters, lawyers, cops") All because he was unlucky enough the one standing closest to a high school metal shop project that had been fired multiple times over a period of over twenty years and finally experienced a structural failure. Fuck them, their cannon, and their local cult of football.

Username: GuitarCD

Summer 2002, a fire took the lives of 6 children (between the ages of 4 and 12). Mother jumped out of the window to survive, being severely injured, one kid survived by having a sleepover at family. The the father was the prime suspect and was officially declared guilty, served 15-years and was released late 2020.

He came home drunk not long before the fire started, had an argument with his wife and left. He was also the one who called the emergency services, begging them to hurry up.

The family was already infamous before then, apparently the children begged their neighbours for food constantly - the mother was never home, always spending her time gambling, the dad worked long 12-hour shifts as a garbageman.

Heavy in debt due to the gambling and substance abuse as well. Our whole town was in shock when it happened, I was around the same age as those kids and remember being extremely shocked by it as well.

Before the trials started people where out on a witch hunt. People blamed the father, others blamed the mother, nobody questioned if it was just plain bad luck. The dad was officially charged, after some evidence came up that suggested he might have lit one of his kids coats on fire, and calling emergency services requesting for police earlier that night.

When refused he apparently mentioned his kids lifes where in danger. At the time the mother refused to see her husband as the culprit, despite arguing constantly with him.

We'll never hear the full truth, but it's still a touchy subject - with people having strong opinions on either side. Regardless of the who's and what's - it is probably one of the biggest tragedies in our town in modern history.

Username: OrangeStar222

This happened at my elementary school. There was this dude we will call Joe who was extremely wealthy. I’m talking 40 super cars, 20 million dollar home and second homes in Europe, etc. Joes kids went to the school.

People always asked Joe what he did for a living since he was so rich and he always responded “lawyer” and refused to elaborate, which people were confused by since not only do lawyers usually only make that much but none of the actual lawyers knew of him.

He was also very infatuated with guns. People that were close to him and had been to his house talked about it and rumors spread that he had 1000+ weapons in a bunker in his home including illegal fully automatic weapons (this was in US before we moved overseas).

Now he was a very well known and respected person in the community because he gave so much money to the school. Well one day he just disappeared from the school socially. His kids still got picked up by their drivers but the Dad just vanished, he was obviously alive and living there since his close friends told everyone he was fine but he stopped going out publicly.

A couple months later, the cops arrested him on charges a National chop shop operation and selling stolen cars, along with possession of illegal firearms. His wife was also super involved too and word quickly spread he was dealing arms to the cartels in massive amounts.

Before he went to prison he told his wife to tell everyone he would never kill himself, he took some special deal where he was only facing around 6 years or something like that. Well in prison he killed himself after around a month.

The theory is that he was killed by cartel people so he wouldn’t talk but the police department which is very corrupt covered it up so they wouldn’t look bad. Well the family is still incredibly rich but they disappeared.

The crazier thing is that he sold a car to a billionaire this super rare Ferrari (this is before he was arrested) and the car got stolen “mid transfer” and Joe kept the cash, some people I know who are close to his family said the billionaire had something to do with his arrest and death since he was mad he got scammed.

The craziest part though is he had this secret warehouse with 600+ super cars that people had seen but he would refuse to tell anyone where it was, he would tie them up and put a bag over there head to stop them of knowing while he drove them there, and he refused to tell his wife where it was.

Well after he died no one know where any of it was and he took it to his grave (this part is fact billionaire thing is speculation). So 50 mil worth of cars is just sitting in a warehouse forever for reference. Crazy stuff.

Username: chefcurryj22

The school shooting in Parkland was at the high school one of my best friends went to and where her parents were teachers. Luckily, we were grown up and moved away by then, and her parents retired. But it's crazy how common school shootings are now. If you don't think it can happen to or near you, Americans, just give it a few months.

To be fair though, the county I grew up in was known for a lot of violence in general. The high school I went to was infamous because a student was stabbed by another student there.

We had to cancel pride week (as in class pride, I swear) one year because two guys who dressed up as women during Gender Bender day (I swear it was class pride and wow was the faculty really not pc) started joking about who was prettiest, somehow it became serious, and one of them pulled a knife. It was pretty funny to us all tbh.

A kid who went to the middle school we all came up through committed suicide. My brother knew his brother. One of our teachers knew a teacher at a different school who was shot to death by her student.

Another teacher told us a troublesome student had followed him into the parking lot and put a gun to his back. The teacher whipped around and fought him; the "gun" turned out to be a wooden hanger. When the student's mother heard about that she showed up with a wooden spoon.

A guy who owned a restaurant next to my mother's business was on To Catch A Predator (as the predator). He tried to convince her it was all a lie and he was just "trying to see how those sting operations worked."

She didn't buy it. South Florida is a crazy place.

Username: chewedupshoes

In my old village, a 9 day old baby was ravaged by dogs. At least, that's what the papers and news reported. Here's what actually happened; so this fam had 2 sweet dogs, a husky and a tiny mangled yorkie with an overbite who was almost blind.

They'd escape the house OFTEN, once a week or so, the husky escape artist and the yorkie followed behind and end up in my mums work place down the road playing with elderly residents who gave them positive attention. They never once bit or harmed anyone.

Despite this, every time my mum called the family to pick up the dogs, They'd take forever to turn up and then berate my mum for not feeding the dogs or tying them up outside (she'd gotten to known the dogs over months of this and got to know them) and mums judgement said they were docile lovely dogs, just starved for attention.

Bit of background, my mums friend worked in the local primary school as a cleaner and dinner lady. The fam had a little girl who was on a strict diet because she apparently had cancer, but she was never taken out of school for treatment, and my mums friend saw the mother of the family shaving her daughters head clean before school.

Kid never gets chemo or treatment, everyone catches on the mother is an attention whore and the kid is perfectly healthy and the mother definitely has munchaussens. But apparently its not a crime to lie about having cancer or your kids having cancer.

So, new baby comes into the world. What the papers reported; baby was left alone for 5 minutes snd a vicious dog attack happened where they ripped her from the scrib and killed her.

What actually happened: baby and dogs left unattended for hours because the parents are doing fuck knows what, dogs get excited and accidentally trip the crib over which causes sensitive baby to fall to the floor, hit her head and die. No bite marks on the baby at all.

Dogs did NOT maul her to death, but yes they were responsible.. or shall we say, the parents were responsible for being idiots and not keeping their escape artist dogs in a different room away from a fragile baby.

The dad ran down the road screaming his dogs had killed his baby, which was a gross overexaggeration of what happened, presumably to get the blame away from the fact the parents were at fault. Not the dogs.

Sadly by the time it was cleared up that baby had NOT been attacked, it was an accident, both dogs were put down. The family milked the shit out of the 'savage dog attack' angle however, and kept spreading lies about what happened.

Everyone in the village knew the truth. The papers never investigated further. I had to tell everyone in Uni the truth as it was big news at the time where I live and front page papers were talking about it, and it was from my village. It was a wake up call for a lot of people about the bias of journalism and not to believe everything you read.

Username: Jill4ChrisRed

3 kids disappeared in the woods one day. Everyone freaked out and thought they had gotten killed by a serial killer. Eventually one of the kids skulls showed up in a cave where there probably had been wolves, the kid also had blunt force trauma and a cracked skull.

The other kids never showed up. A couple weeks later the remains of another kid shower up, this time it was at the bottom of a ravine. He also seemed to had been eaten by some sort of carnivore probably wolves. Then eventually about 2 months later the last kid turned up alive.

He said that they had been chased by a strange man with an axe, they ran into the woods and got lost. Unlucky for them a wolf pack were in their way. They got separated and when the kid tried to go rescue his friends he claims to have been kidnapped by a wolf who could stand in two legs and looked like a human.

He was then imprisoned in a cave where this guy "wolf" and the other wolves lived. For 2 months he barely ate anything, only eating the meat these wolves left behind sometimes. When he turned up he was super skinny and traumatized.

Later on the guy who had "chased" them showed up, he wasn't a crazy murder who chased kids he was a woodsman who was concerned about the kids being in the woods so late during the day. He says he tried to tell the kids to go home but they ran into the woods and never saw them again. He assumed they had gone home after but he didn't know since he was from next town over.

Eventually the whole mystery was kind of put together, a pack of wolves had attacked the kids, one died when he tried to run away from the wolves, the other fell into a revive doing the same and died from the fall, the other one somehow miraculously made it into a cave that the wolves lived in but somehow the wolves weren't interested in eating him, going as far as giving him food.

The poor kid who survived was so traumatized that he couldn't remember correctly what had happened, apparently according to the investigators his friend got eaten in front of him. This kid later on took his own life.

There's still a lot of unsure things like how did they not find the kid when they found the other one's skull, since apparently the other kid had been in the same cave all the time even when his friend got eaten.

There was a huge search party and they somehow missed the specific cave in which this kid had gone into or apparently someone had been concerned there were wolves in there and didn't want to risk their own lives.

There's so much unanswered that people believe in truly was some sort of werewolf type of situation. I just think it's stupid speculation and it was the kid having a meltdown after seeing his friend get eaten and eating raw meat and living with wolves for almost 2 months. But hey idk I live in the city now I ain't gonna get eaten by no werewolf

Username: SkullWasTaken

My friend used to live on a tiny, mediterranean island with one inhabited village. It's very tight- knit place. Two English women moved to the island when their father bought one of the oldest houses on the island.

They integrated well with the locals and over time were just seen as islanders. As time went on, one of the sisters decided that the characters she encountered on a daily basis were so entertaining that she was going a write a fictional book, loosely based on her community.

The book was published, a party was thrown and everyone was excited to get their hands on a copy. Well, they read it and the backlash was instant. A group of around 30 village elders showed up outside her balcony screaming, swearing and demanding that she come down to face them.

She declined so instead they demanded that she destroy all copies of her book and leave the island immediately. She declined but over the next few years she was shunned by everyone to the point where the local shop keepers would often pretend to close when they saw her walking towards their establishment and the man would refuse to collect her bins so she had to take them to the dump on the other side of the island by herself.

It turns out that her book was all about about the extra-marital affairs going on around her on the island. She had changed people's names In the book but it was still obvious to anyone who she was describing, she hadn't changed any of the occupations and for an island with only 300 inhabitants it caused chaos.

The worst part was a description of an event that took place at a local festival on the island each year. The festival is held at the top of a big hill, the original site of the settlement and now an abandoned village with empty houses and a Chapel.

The festival was underway and the English women was talking a stroll away from the main festivities for some air, as she passed the Chapel she heard noises and peeked through a broken window. To her surprise, she saw two of the teenage girls from the village being railed by a group of teen boys, turns out there were about 6 young guys and they were taking it in turns. the others would stand outside the front of the Chapel until they were tagged in.

If the woman had approached from the front door, they would have seen her but as she had approached from the side, she saw and heard the whole thing. Naturally, this event made it into the book.

Unfortunately for the teen girls involved, there were only 5 teenage girls on the island at the time and they were easily identified. According to my friend, their parents lost their shit and the teens on the island are all very closely monitored these days.

Username: Kylo-The-Optimist

A captain in the army, his father a brigadier, fancied a girl who was already engaged to someone. They asked the family to break up the engagement, offered plots of land and flat in the capital as gift. When the girl refused, her parents beat her up and barred her from continuing with her education (medicine last year).

One day she took her chance, met her fiancé and they got married the same day. She went back home and told the family after another week. She was again beaten up at which point she left her house. The couple went into hiding.

The guys family came to their house and offered to help find them and resolve the issue amicably. Girls family went to police and filed charges of abduction and rape on the boy, his brother and father. The brigadier sent soldiers and police to pick them up.

The couple was in hiding and they couldn’t find the father. His brother was abducted from his house, all his valuable stolen by police, and locked up and beaten. Next day the girl showed up in court to call out their lies.

Court ordered that the brother be released but the brigadier pressured police to keep him locked up. They sent army vans (vigo dala) to the boy’s friends houses and traced the whole family’s phone and called them issuing death threats.

They raided their whole extended family when they found out the couple had actually left the country and gone to Saudi. They tracked them down in Saudi and threatened to have them deported from there. They found out their flight schedule and decided to catch them when they landed back in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, they offered to reconcile and asked the boys father to visit them. 20 min before the meeting, boys father found out they were going to incriminate him in drug trafficking.

A few days later, family was able to track where the elder brother was being kept and they met him with a lawyer. Unbeknownst to the police and brigadier, back in college this guy was room mate with son in law of one of the highest ranking officer in the army.

He was also good friends with one of the best lawyers in the country. As soon as he was able to, he called his friends. The police officer who took part in it was suspended. High court issued orders of contempt and release.

The brigadier was called for an inquiry and two generals signed off on the official complaint against him, effectively ending any career hopes he had. The couple went to a western country and settled there.

Username: [deleted]

This is regarding my hometown where I haven’t lived for two and a half decades. One that isn’t really talked about because it happened so long ago involved my brothers dads family (we’re half brothers). He had a great uncle who was a bootlegger and he was shot and killed in an illegal brothel and it was always believed by the family that he was murdered by the police because they knew he was a bootlegger and into illegal business but couldn’t ever catch him.

His father was hit and killed by a train. He was deaf and walking along the tracks while reading and was hit from behind. The police scraped up what they could for burial. But somehow after the funeral, they found more remains and didn’t alert the family.

They put it into a wooden crate and threw it off a bridge into a deep creek. Someone tipped off the family and his sons went for a swim and managed to find the box of remains and buried it in the cemetery with the rest of his remains. This all happened in the 50s.

The only recent scandal that comes to mind that people outside of the town may have heard of is a female officer who was shot and reported being shot by a black male. Things didn’t add up and the investigation uncovered that she’d shot herself with her service weapon. I don’t remember why she did it, maybe trying to get some leave.

The biggest scandal in my mind was my grandmothers murder though it wasn’t highly publicized so nobody outside of the town has heard of it. I found my grandmother after she was murdered and the entire case was ruined by the local police.

They didn’t secure the crime scene and let anyone in who came by so all of the crime scene photos had the two lead suspects in the background and so none of the evidence could be used because of course those two peoples prints and hair was at the scene of the crime, they were right there in the photos.

Since the detectives blew their evidence, they tried to pin it on my uncle (with zero evidence and he had an alibi. They couldn’t pin it on him legally so they put it out into the community that he was guilty or knew who was hoping that mob justice would do it’s thing.

And he did get attacked several times and the police wouldn’t do anything about it. He eventually killed himself. Then lead detective was eventually fired when a neighboring police department was doing a drug raid and he was on the couch of the drug house high out of his mind when they burst through the door.

He’d been blackmailing the drug dealers for free drugs for years apparently.

Username: ChampChains

Let's see...3 people were brutally murdered in a McDonalds up the street from me during a robbery, the flack was so bad that McDonalds tore down the restaurant and build a reolacemwnt a block down the street (there is still nothing there, its like the only vcant area on that strip of road, but in fair ess i think aside feom a house it was the last rhing on that side before the highway) and people used to freak out around rhe anniversary of the killing.

Everyone involved got caught and sentenced, they are only just now starting to get parole, i beleive the ringleader (there were three) is somewhat unrepentant/unfeeling about the whole thing to this day.

On a similar vein a woman was murdered in a popular conveience store during what looked like a robbery, but cops were convinced that the husband had done it or had someone do it. For nearly 2 decades cops and press hasseled this guy at every turn only to find out that it was in fact a robbery gone wrong and the dude who did it bragged to an undercover cop halfway acriss the country.

I was covering the sentencing and some of the other press couldnt help but get one last shot in with some shit questions. I watched as any sense of closure the man had appeared to be snatched away and sullied, i changed careers shortly after.

And the creme de la creme, my town is the town where local police and prosecutors framed Donald Marshall Jr. For the murder of Sandy Seale. Marshall was there (allegedly he and seale were looking for people to rob and picked the wrong one) but Marshall was target by our police cheif, who had beleived a rumor thst Marshall, who had been i and out of low level trouble, had tipped over his fathers gravestone.

The whole thing involved falsified evidence and testamony and Marshall serving a number of years in jail for a crime that (if folks had access to the materials) was pretty clear he did not commit (or at least not supported by the evidence) he was eventually freed once the turth came out and received a payout and became one of an upsettinly large number of aboriginal men targeted by police during the late 1900s.

He also ended upas the center of the aboriginal right to fish issue, which isnstill not properly resolved and has two supreme court decisions that bear his name.

Username: [deleted]

Even though this is recent, here it is. I’ll use fake names. Emily and Jessica were friends! Jessica was absolutely insane and obviously has mental problems. Emily was such a sweet hearted woman that she befriended Jessica even though she had been known for faking pregnancies and whatnot.

Emily even invited Jessica to her wedding! Emily found out she was pregnant with her now husbands baby! Everyone was so excited, and coincidentally Jessica turned up pregnant a month later. They shared their pregnancies together and were so excited to have one another.

Emily was one month away from delivering her baby boy and Jessica decided to stop by Emily’s home after Frank (emily’s husband) left for work. Jessica then beat Emily to death, also slicing her throat (which the scene was so terrible the paramedics didn’t even find the scalpel she used to slice her throat until way later) with a scalpel.

I knew the family and her mother is the one who found her, blood and brain matter all over the walls, ceiling and floor. Emily also had a little girl sleeping 3 feet away from where Jessica had just murdered her, and she was awake when it happened. That’s not even the worst part.

Jessica gave Emily a botched C section and then stole the baby, put the placenta in her pants and proceeded to the hospital pretending she had just had a baby. (shocker, not really but Jessica was faking yet another pregnancy.) Jessica realized she needed a baby or she was going to lose her boyfriend, so she murdered Emily and stole her baby from her dead body.

The hospital quickly realized that this woman did NOT just give birth and called the police. The poor sweet baby was going to be named Emmett (also changed for privacy), he passed away as well. Jessica is currently awaiting her sentencing where our state is seeking the death penalty by lethal injection.

The little girl was Emily’s daughter, and was asleep in the beginning but woke up due to loud noises. she even later spoke to police and told them “mommy’s friend hit her on the head.” sorry for not clarifying my comment is extremely long already.

Username: NoPerception_24

I can’t say for certain whether the town at large knew about all the details of this but here we go. Initially I wanted to post this in the thread about terrible sleep overs.

When I was in 4th grade I had a social studies teacher who was (at that time) a bit of an odd ball. He was eccentric in a few ways. His classroom was full of weird history related stuff. Sometimes he would come to school with painted nails (he had a daughter several grades ahead of me). This isn’t too weird but it was the 90s. Anyhow at this time I had two very close friends.

But there was a girl in my grade I wanted to be closer friends with, Cori. Cori invited me and a lot of other girls to a sleepover one night. She lived a stones throw from the school. I should also mention at the time my mom was the special Ed teacher at this same school. Cori’s mother also worked at the school as a teachers aid.

So I go to this sleepover but in the middle of the night we are woken up by loud banging and shouting. Turns out it’s *the principle* of our elementary school. He’s drunk and upset at Cori’s mom. At the time I was quite confused. It wasn’t until a couple years later I pieced it all together.

Cori’s mother had been sleeping with *the principle* and *my social studies teacher.* If you haven’t realized, the principle is kind of a scumbag. Anyhow I was able to confirm this because my dad worked with principles wife at the local prison.

So while people weren’t flat out in the open with this information it was pretty common knowledge. From what I remember principles wife was a nice lady so all around this situation is pretty fucked up. I believe summer after 5th grade Cori and her mom moved away. Makes sense right?!

Fast forward many years later, pretty sure I was in college. I’m home visiting my parents and they inform me that *the principle* has died. Only he didn’t just die. The man was out mowing his yard on a riding mower. He didn’t live out in the country, he had close neighbors.

Apparently his very elderly neighbor heard him mowing and had a ‘nam flashback. This old man promptly went outside and shotgunned my old principle right off the riding mower. To be fair that man was a right asshole and so all I can think is karma. Small towns are weird.

Username: hoeofky

There are a few that I can think of: Supposedly, back in the late 70s/early 80s, members of the local police department were caught stealing. No big deal, but they were stealing from homes of people who had reported to the police that they would be out of town, on vacation, etc. and asked the police to drive by and keep an eye on their house as this was a service the police offered or suggested or something.

Apparently, it was a pretty big scandal; when I tried to research it in the early 2000s though, I couldn’t find any corroboration. But if you talked to people from town who had lived there since then, they knew exactly what you meant.

When the song Blurred Lines was big, the high school dance team made the national news because their coach choreographed a dance to it that they performed at football and basketball games. I grew up in a rural, smaller city in Wisconsin space Dash,

When the song blurred lines was big, the high school dance team made the national news because their coach choreographed a dance to it that they performed at football and basketball games. I grew up in a smaller city in Wisconsin - parents were PISSED. I think the coach maybe even got fired?

Last one. Our high school commons area had a sort of sculptural painting (I don’t really know how to describe it; it was a painting but it wasn’t flat, and it was freestanding basically) of our mascot. In the mid to thousands, some kids decided to steal it as a senior prank.

Well, turns out the artist was semi famous or something, and the piece was actually worth thousands and thousands of dollars. They eventually returned it, but it was damaged. There was a huge brouhaha because the principal wanted to expel the kids but people objected because these were “good kids from good families and had good futures ahead of them.”

So eventually they settled on not allowing the boys to walk at graduation and also not allowing them to go to the school sponsored post graduation party that 95% of kids went to. It sounds super lame but there were editorials in the paper, people are talking about it all over the place...small towns, man

Username: ouijabore

I grew up in a little town in Illinois with about 16,000 residents. In the '90's, an old electrician and his buddies (a shady minister, a disgraced local cop, etc.) [started a Ponzi scheme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Trust).

They went to churches and claimed that they had the ability to turn a $100 investment into a $5000 profit in less than a year, not including the sizable donation to charity that was also being generated. This, they claimed was being accomplished through international currency exchanges.

Most of their "marks" were from the Internet, or other small towns, so locally, they were under the radar. Of course, they got stupid, and started acting like big shots. They bought a local restaurant, demolished it, built a new one in its place, and started hanging out there doing business like they were mob bosses.

They gave low/no interest cash loans of hundreds of thousands of dollars to local people and businesses, and got a reputation of being very generous. They'd also buy local business that were not in great shape, and run them like personal hobbies.

In the end, the Feds swooped in and the whole thing came crashing down. Several local business (and homeowners) who had taken "loans" from these guys suddenly had to start paying the loans back to the Fed, or lose their property. Other businesses, like the restaurant, just failed, almost immediately, because they weren't making any money without the scam income.

One of the co-conspirators was a former co-worker of mine. He'd shot and killed his wife years before while he was a local cop (or maybe deputy) and had gotten away with the "cleaning my gun" excuse. He'd worked as a pretend PI and repo man (where I encountered him) for years after.

He was found to have acquired a classic car collection numbering in the dozens, with cars parked in garages all over the county. When he was taken to trial, he literally tried to fake a heart attack in the courtroom. That failed. The impacts of this scheme were felt for a decade in my sleepy little hometown.

Username: EarhornJones

My wife and I lived in NJ for 3 years. On the 3rd floor there was a couple that lived 3 doors down from us who argued pretty much everyday. One night I came back from an event in NYC and the girlfriend was laid out on the floor in the hallway in front of her door. I went into my apartment and told my wife, and she came out with me to see if she needed anything.

The girlfriend that was on the floor was drunk (which we thought at first) so we tried to give her water. She couldn't make any sentences or anything. We asked her multiple times if she wanted us to call 911, she understood that, but kept saying no. All this time we were talking to her the boyfriend inside the apartment kept yelling "SUCK MY DICK, TO MY DICK YOU BITCH, SUCK MY DICK"

After an hour the girlfriend asked if it would be ok to stay in our apartment for the night. We had no issue with this because my wife and I saw and spoke with her multiple times and she was really nice. However, we only saw the boyfriend twice in 3 years.

We set up a place for her to sleep in the living room and we all went to sleep. The next morning I woke up to loud crying and when I came out the bedroom my wife was trying to console her. My wife asked me to leave the apartment while they talked more. I went to my friend's apartment on the 6th floor and stayed there for awhile.

When I came back the she was gone and my wife told me briefly what was happening. She said the boyfriend R worded her multiple times, but that night we saw her he R worded and drugged her and he threw her out the apartment that she paid for.

Few days later there was another argument, and turns out the girlfriend was leaving to stay with family in another state. After she left it was quiet, but then after a few weeks the doorman we were good friends with informed us that the apartment was raided by police.

Boyfriend was arrested, and we didn't hear from him since. Girlfriend came back after this and there was no more issues after. My wife and I moved out in 2022, but that woman still keeps in contact with us.

When we last spoke to her the boyfriend is awaiting sentencing on felony charges and will be gone for a very long time based on his past. She thanked us for taking her in that night and hopefully she meets someone that can appreciate her.

Username: theysocool

Ok, so my town isn't that small. Around 50k people living here. But our biggest scandal was with the show choir instructor at one of the high schools. He was a really good instructor. Their shows were always good, made huge sales with their tickets for the school, won multiple awards in competitions, etc.

Guy did a lot of good for the school in that department. Something I always found odd was how fucking *expensive* it was to be in the show choir. It was like $1500 per *costume alone.* Not to mention how much it was just to join. I never got the details on that unfortunately.

Well as it would turn out, a year or so after I graduated (I went to a different school but I had a lot of friends who went to the school in question). It came to light that he had been extorting money from the program. That $1500 price tag for the costumes? Yeah, he took like 75% of that or something along those lines and pocketed it. Oh he also cheated on his wife (not with any of the students thank god).

So many people both at the school and a few parents knew. But because he was getting the school so much money from awards and ticket sales, not to mention bribes to the administration who knew of his sleazy antics, nothing was done about it.

Until others started talking. And once word got out amongst the students, he attempted suicide by head-on-collision with a semi trying to make it look like an accident.

Fortunately a friend of mine who works as an EMS happened to drive by the accident. And, like all good medical professionals and emergency responders have, she had a first aid kit and was able to stabilize him until an ambulance could arrive. Hooo boy did the fallout hit him hard. After his hospital stay he was thrown in jail (don't remember for how long), and was hit with some pretty heavy charges.

Username: [deleted]

Orofino, Idaho. I went to school there for a couple years back in the mid-2000’s. It had a population of around 14,000 back then and fewer than 8,000 now. There’s *a* theater, *a* pizza joint, 2 bars, and a gas station.

The rest is all auto shops and a couple grocery/liquor stores, but somehow a half dozen churches. This town is also *aggressively* conservative. I went to visit for the first time last year and every single house was waving trump flags and most businesses had “COVID IS A HOAX” signs in their windows.

I tell you all this so you have an idea as to how open-minded its residents might be.

At one of the local churches, there was a warm, kind-hearted pastor I loved. He always preached about love and acceptance, forgiveness, and he leaned heavily on the idea that we all need to step out of our personal bubbles and learn to see beauty in things we may not understand. Super nice guy, I don’t think I ever saw him express any emotion other than pure joy at doing what he loved.

One day, my mom was gossiping with somebody and I overheard a surprisingly hateful conversation. The short version was basically “Pastor ___ told his wife he’s gay, that explains all those lessons on accepting people we don’t approve of, I knew something was wrong with him. He needs to go.”

The rest I heard through classmates so I can’t vouch for how much is true, but from there the story is that nobody would talk to or look at the pastor after that. His wife and kids were being harassed *everywhere*, some of my classmates even admitted to and bragged about participating.

Eventually they got divorced and he moved back to England, his family moved somewhere else. Fuck that whole town, seriously. I hope my pastor is doing ok.

Username: ThatVoiceDude

Town of 700. Midwest. Typical small towns scandals with exception to the one where the kid who was from the wrong family and not well liked in town was found inside his burnt up trailer home dead. The thing is he was wheelchair bound from a bad accident and was paralyzed from the neck down. His wheelchair was found in the yard with zero burn marks on it.

The high school volleyball/track coach slept with 2 senior girls and they got into a massive fight over him IN the school gym. Nothing ever happened to him and he went on coaching. Luckily I had a male track mate who intervened when the same coach tried to put the moves on me. Thanks Marty.

All of the most prominent church going families in town think those Saturday night swinger swap is a secret. It’s not. One of the couples has a hot tub outside of town (very rural Midwest). It their regular meeting spot.

A bunch of us was out country cruising one night and we happened to drive by to a shit ton of naked people going at it in the hot tub and on the deck in full view of the road. These are the people that will be front and center in church on Sunday morning and judge the “sinners” in our community.

A body was found in a well south of town. It’s never been identified.

One the kids I went to high school with whipped the local cops ass. The kid had a reputation but the cop took it upon himself to harass him at every turn. He was just hanging out up town one night and the cop tried to bust him on some bullshit charges. The kids mother intervened and the cop shoved her.

The kid choked slammed him and turned him into a human pretzel. Not much was done about it other then the cop slunk away to a different county. Word is the kids dad (mean ass drunk) threatened to kill the cop if he stuck around.

Username: Plus_Salamander6764

Ok. So we had a religious nut job who would travel all across the state to find inmates leaving the prisons that needed a place to call home. Sounds nice enough. Until you realize he singled out specifically violent sex offenders and violent murderers.

He would bring these people to live in his home with just him and his elementary school daughter. At one point there were almost 30 guys living there. He would not follow proper parole guidelines and would let them go to the schools and the playgrounds unattended, right when the kids would be going out for recess.

He also let them do as they please, and would defend them when they went around threatening to murder people. He took them under the pretense that he was going to improve their lives through faith. In reality he made them work in his carpentry business at no pay, saying that the pay they would have earned went immediately back to him for providing them with food and a roof over their heads.

There was aaaalways stuff popping up about this place in the papers. There was a concerned citizens movement that tried to legally get him out if town. But the police never pushed him too much because this guy's felon army outnumbered the police department. Not to mention that anytime somebody did try, he claimed it was in the name of religious persecution.

It was just all a mess. I lived just a couple of miles away from this place growing up and it is something that a teenage girl can never fully push out of her head because you never know what might happen.

Username: Viodia

But the revenge murder was ruled a suicide. A guy’s girlfriend shot and killed him. She then wrote a long letter that told all kinds of information on people they knew and said she was being physically abused by him. She was later found dead in a local church cemetery with a broken leg and gunshot wound.

They didn’t even really try to solve the murder case - lots of rumors one of the sheriffs mentioned in her letter (as cheating on his spouse) did it. I may have missed some of the details. This just happened in the past few years. I wish it would get national attention and her murderer would be sentenced.

In the late 90s or early 2000s, a woman was found dead in her home. Her two girls were home at the time and apparently closed in another room while everything went down. Everyone said it was her husband and that he admitted it.

But, they later arrested a local A/C or plumber man who had visited the home before and then apparently returned to murder her. Everyone believed it was the husband still. If he didn’t do it, his life was messed up either way because small town gossip is brutal.

Finally, there was this really creepy family in town who had two kids who were born from incest - can’t remember how the parents were related, but they were. I think they abused the children as well. The children were very strange.

They grew up and the girl got a boyfriend. He murdered both of her parents after finding out how the pieces of shit treated their daughter. He’s in prison now. Don’t know where she is. This is a VERY small town in Georgia. I’m probably missing a good number of stories.

Username: MarillaIsle

A kid died at home doing an assignement, and the school was blamed for it. In Norway we have this education system that allow you to study in specific fields like health, engineering and art. The kid was in the sports field, and had gotten an assignment to plan and document a training period.

These tools are rarely used outside of the top sports divisions, but its part of the field so they were assigned to make one of these plans. Basically, the kid used improper form at a shoulder press, passed out mid rep, and fell om his back and got the barbell smashed into his throat killing him.

As you can imagine the press was outraged, everyone passed this off as a tragedy since it was an accident. But a bunch of inconsiderate fucking journalists tried to blame the school and the homeroom teacher for the incident. They made several articles, each with different excuses for why this was their fault.

Turns out each and every articles was just an attempt to find a foundation of wich they wanted to sue. Turns out one of their ex-employees was the kids uncle so they could use him to sue the school for replacement (directly translated idk what you say in English).

They were low on founds and tried for months to stur up an outrage. But they only ended up provoking everyone and was forced to drop the case eventually since more and more stopped buying their papers.

In short fuck journalism. That poor kids family was pestered for months too. They refused to blame anyone for the death of their child. But the press didn’t like that fact so they kept publishing news about a case that was closed along time ago.

Username: Intelligentgandalv

Other than a whirlwind opiate craze in the 2005-2010 era, the big one was probably the high school's email scandal.

One of the teachers (Math teacher) had a reputation for being kind of a creep. He'd hover over desks and look down at your work... but mostly if you were a girl wearing a shirt with an open neck. Math Teacher had no daughters or any relation to anyone in school, and no athletics history (math teacher), but he volunteered to coach for the girls' tennis and girl's track and field teams. Just generally... weird vibes.

One day, a student formally accuses Math Teacher of sexual harassment, claiming that he took pictures of her on the field and emailed them to other male teachers. He's suspended for a week during the fallout.

It turns out to be false, at least the pictures part; the leading theory is that she was hoping to get out of a test and banking on Math Teacher's reputation being enough to get him fired, since she changed her story a few times since the first accusation. But, they checked all his school emails, checked the emails of other teachers to see if anything was sent, and nothing is found, so he's given his job back.

However, while they were checking the teachers' emails, they find a string of _highly_ inappropriate emails between the married 40-year-old Gym Teacher and a junior student- starting all the way back when she was a freshman.

He's immediately fired, he and his wife divorce, and he moves out of town ASAP. I still don't know what he ended up charged with or if he ever saw the inside of a jail, but pretty much nobody ever saw him again.

Username: Princess_Moon_Butt

When I was a freshman in HS the school district asked the city for a $21 million bond and the city passed it. The schools got some improvements but a lot of it was cheap. I only saw what they did to the HS. All the new construction was very poorly done.

For example all the rooms got new windows, but these windows where a few inches shorter than the originals so they just used caulk to fill in the gaps... And I mean there would be so much caulk that is was from the top of the window down to the floor, since the gaps were so wide the caulk kept running down.

By the time I was a senior the school district asked for a second, $24 million bond. I don't remember what actually happened with this request other than during my Freshman year of college the FBI got involved and cleaned out the school district's records building. The FBI found so much illegal activity I don't know where to start.

The construction company was owned by a friend of the super attendant and every corner was cut and they were paid for work they never done. The super attendant's daughter was given a multiple million dollar house for a wedding gift.

Everything the school reported to get extra funding was a lie, example: 100s of x-cons registered for rehabilitation classes when there was 0, no classes at all. Just to name a few things ... So after a lengthy trial the super attendant gets a slap on the wrist.

Has to give back $2 million and the time he spent in jail for the trial covered his sentence, so he was free to go. BTW there's still like $16 million unaccounted for...

Username: pfated64

The district Attorney in my town 1983 to 2010 prosecuted some notorious cases of wrongful convictions, and engaged in what is now acknowledged widely to have been a pattern of prosecutorial misconduct, in which he convicted innocent people of abusing children.

He had a bunch of kids doped up by their social workers after being taken from their parents. Forced them to say their parents were molesting them. The social workers conditioned the kids into thinking they would get to go home if they just said what the district attorney wanted. I know dozens of families that were ruined because of this.

It gets worse. At about the same time the DA took office, The town was in the midst of a strange scandal. Rumors had circulated for years that older, well-connected men among politicians, judges, law enforcement, and business elite were involved in sex rings with underage teen boys. several young gay men in the community were murdered in the early 1980s, and the accused were given relatively light sentences.

ALSO one of these young gay men was the assistant DA’s sugar baby in secret. The father was angry that his son was out doing drugs and in trouble without consequences because the DA would never prosecute.

The young man died in a car crash in the Assistant DAs car and his father went and shot and killed the assistant DA in cold blood out of anger for his sons’s death. It was a closed court room, and I believe the young man’s father received a light sentence (for murder) in exchange for keeping his mouth shut.

Username: Baby_Yoduh