To ask if you’ve ever become obsessed with a murder case?

@Boiledbeetle I have nothing to add to this thread but I just wanted to say how sorry I am that this happened to you. I hope you’ve managed to bury many of the demons and live your life the best you can. You come across so well on your posts and I truly hope you get access to the information you want someday.

https://www.cheshire-live.co.uk/news/local-news/ellesmere-port-man-sentenced-13-5185532

So, (short version)

he got his first conviction for rape when he was 12 (don't know what his punishment was).

He got his second conviction for rape when he was 15 (went to a Borstal from what I was told by the police)

Then at 18 he murdered Agnes, went to prison,

managed to convince them in prison he was mentally ill,

got transferred to Rampton where he managed to convince them he was now mentally well and the idiots released him on license.

He floats around doing god knows what for a short while

Meets my mum

Mum decides to let him move in

He tells his probation officer he's going to rape one of the children in the house once he's moved in.

Probation officer tells my mum (and just about everyone else he could think of including the Home Office who all refused to stop him from moving in) not to let him move in and never to leave him alone with the children

She puts cock before kids and let's him move in.

He carries out his plan to rape one of the kids!

By the time I went to the Police my mother was long dead, so she wasn't punished for her part in it.

And he died in prison.

I watched the documentary on Netflix last night about the murder of Laci Peterson.

I absolutely think Scott did it, but I don’t think I’d be able to find him guilty. It’s all circumstantial evidence. There is no evidence that he murdered her; it couldn’t even be determined how, when, where she and her unborn baby died.

Having said that, his behaviour, like so other men who are guilty was so bizarre after it. That’s what makes them suspects in the first place.
It’s funny how they can’t even pretend to show any emotion. He was stone cold, and kept in contact with his girlfriend (who didn’t know he was married), lied to her that he was travelling when in fact he was on the news and at vigils for his missing wife, he said on a tv interview that he can’t bring himself to go into the baby’s nursery and just keeps the door closed, but when the police checked the house, he was using that room to store clutter from around the house. He knew the baby wouldn’t be coming home and didn’t have any attachment to it as his son’s nursery.

Wow I am so sorry to hear this, I have so many questions I don't know where to start. So your a victim of Steven Rush worth? I tried to look it up said record closed, so I'm sorry can you give more details as to what happened to your mother once this vile man did what he did to you? Did she get convicted also? I take it he raped you as a child?

The jonbenet case is very, very bizarre. I eas very little when it happened so have no actual memory of the initial reporting and only learned about it from the later documentaries and podcasts. I watched one of the fairly recent documentaries that went from the angle that Burke her brother did it and the parents were trying to cover it up. I also listened to a podcast that made a very convincing case that it could have been her mother. Either way, if all the available facts about evidence etc are true, it seems so unlikely that an intruder broke into the home.

Only just catching up on the thread, when he was released after the murder he started going out with my mum, who despite being warned by his probation officer not to let him move in with her did indeed let him move in, with her and her two young children! And I became his next victim.

Hey thanks for that, I was really enjoying reading
You have natural ability so should take it up, I know I'd read what you wrote!

It may as well have been the dark ages, the church still had huge sway here. The investigation was disgusting poor jh was vilified, I'm delighted she got retribution in recent years but she had to live her life under a cloud of suspicion, I tried watching the movie about it but I just couldn't bring myself to watch the poor treatment of her whilst the man who she was seeing was left alone

I live a few minutes walk from where a notorious murder victims body was found.

It's unsolved after decades.

I sometimes wonder if the murderer is alive and living nearby.

@Wildbird12 yes I understood it was a full sibling of baby "John" who voluntarily gave a DNA sample.

If you knew you had given birth to a baby and the baby disappeared and a baby was found locally with 28 stab wounds around the same time ..........

Re the Kerry Babies Case... I think I heard that it was a sibling of John that gave DNA? A full sibling who had no idea he was a sibling? And that the parents of baby John had stayed together and had a family. I don't know if this is true - I think I read it online at the time?

A very sad case - what on earth must have happened. This was Ireland in the eighties...it wasn't the dark ages. How could these parents have stood back and let the family of JH go through hell?

Re JonBenet, if I recall correctly, the "exoneration" was politically motivated because the Ramsays were wealthy.

Reading the couple's own book convinced me that there was no intruder (quite opposite of what they intended in writing it!)

The self-serving narcissism and obsession with "image" is so blatant in their smarmy tale. Between that and the ransom note, no doubt in my mind.

I don't think it was intentional, just a fit of anger and bizarre cover up. Wish John would admit it, before he dies. He must be 80-ish or more.

The death of Baby Matthew Eappen ,and the Louise Woodward trial has always intrigued me i had a friend who aupaired in Boston the year after Louise started aupairing and was there during the trial ,I also went to visit her a week or two after Louise was released from prison ,my friends theory was maybe an accident had happened with the older brother who was three and known to be quite boisterous
My personal beleif is that Louise wss very young and immature to be looking after two very small children ,I don't think she deliberately harmed Matthew but I think she was negligent and he either fell or there was an accident with the older brother ,she was known to spend a lot of time on the phone.

The documentary barely mentioned her brother
And said patsy had been completely exonerated after her, death
It's a very strange case.

I too hope you get answers and get some kind of closure and can make peace with what happened in your life @Boiledbeetle

It's not a murder I'm obsessed with ( the title of this thread "To ask if you've ever become obsessed with a murder case ?" ) but I think about is The Kerry Baby case, where a newborn baby boy was found stabbed to death on a beach near Caherciveen in Co. Kerry, Ireland in 1984.

28 stab wounds were inflicted on the little baby boy, who was given the name John.

A woman and her family were falsely implicated in the murder in the most farcical way and subsequently received an apology and financial compensation from the State.

In 2021 the baby's body was exhumed and people in the area had voluntarily given DNA to the Gardai (Irish police force ) in the reopened investigation.
In 2023 a man in his 60s and a woman in her 50s, married and living in the area were arrested as DNA proved they were the parents of the baby.
A family member had given their DNA to the police and it led back to the couple.

The couple were subsequently released from custody.

I hope you get some answers and that helps you get closure and some peace, if possible. I guess that shows how after committing these horrific crimes, we see fit to release these monsters to do further harm. I saw he did 7 years for that crime. Seven years. It’s insulting and I’m sure you feel that deeply. Again, really hope you get answers x

That it had to be one of the family. There wasn't any evidence of an intruder and the mother Patsy wrote the ransom note according to handwriting experts. So as a PP said, the current theory seems to point towards it being the brother and the parents covering it up.

I remember that (re Ripper) so clearly - 'No Woman is Now Safe' plastered across the front pages of all the papers. I was about 10-11 at the time and it was such a frightening thing to read. It does also remind me though of that awful distinction the police seemed to make at the time between prostitute and non-prostitute victims, in hindsight the deaths of those poor sex workers definitely weren't taken as seriously. Such misogyny.

The Ripper murders had a profound effect on me, growing up. It became VERY close to home when one of the murders happened where my Mum walked our dog every day & the police declared that "no woman was safe". I don't think if you didn't live through that, you can understand how terrifying it was...such a dark time!
There was a murder of a young model, called Sally Ann Bowman & the brutality of that was horrific, She had been dropped off in the early hours by her boyfriend & was yards from her door. I remember she'd been bitten, raped & stabbed to death. The family uses to appear on TV a lot appealing for information & she was so loved & they were so broken, it was heartbreaking. Mark Dixie, the guy who did it...his defense was he found her dead & had sex with her body. Unbelievable!!!
Nothing has ever affected me like the Madeleine McCann case...I have twin daughters, who were a similar age & I used to cry every time I thought about it & just prayed that they found her.

It’s one that fascinates me. I think ones that fascinate me are because there’s so many reasons why they could be guilty or innocent. Sheila was disturbed. But could the gun fit under her to shoot herself. To get someone to stand lay down while you shoot them twice under the neck is also hard to believe. But then bamber was money orientated and you could see a motive. Also you’d think Sheila would have been overpowered with her being tiny. Yet how did an intruder get in. They suggested Jeremy came through a window. So many unanswered questions.

I watched a few times murder in the valleys documentary. Still cannot decide who did that. The Clydach murders. It was like a storyline from a film.

What is the podcast called please?

I think most come to the conclusion that her brother Burke did it and the parents covered it up. Badly.

Yes I watched it ,
What is the general consensus of what happened?

I'm obsessed with loads of true crime! Sometimes when I feel really stressed or anxious, I choose a random case and write a whole article about it from start to finish (or as finished as it is so far).

It always bothers me when I read about a true crime case and can just get snippets from outdated news articles or posts, so I write my own complete one. I know that's very weird. The process of researching it and writing it out really relaxes me, and delving into the depths of the human mind and how low people can go/how normal people can do evil things in the right circumstances/how easy it can be and how small the trigger for these things to happen, it fascinates me, and it makes me feel that whatever is bothering me right now is fairly small.

Some cases that I've done recently which really interested me:

1. The murder of Catherine Carroll - young guy called Brian (19/20 years old) got high and drunk at a NYE party and murdered his friend Greg's mum after breaking into her house when she was sleeping. Poor Greg not only faced the trauma of finding his mum's body but was also convicted of and imprisoned for the crime.
2. The Boston Strangler! Absolutely fascinating. I can't figure out what I think! Was there one serial killer? Was there an original killer and some copycats? Were they just all unrelated cases? And who was/were the killers? I was so sure that Albert DeSalvo wasn't guilty and had been lying/covering for someone else, but then his DNA was found on the final victim years later. It's all so odd.
3. The Geylang Bahru murders. A mum and dad leave the house at 6:00 a.m. every day to run their business as school bus drivers, phoning their children on the home phone to wake them up for school each day. One day, the mum makes the phone call to wake up her children and there's no answer. When she gets home, she finds the 4 children stabbed to death and piled up on one another in the bathroom. No witnesses, nobody heard anything, nobody saw anything weird, despite the fact that it was a very busy and crowded apartment complex where everyone knew everyone. To this day the case hasn't been solved.
4. The murder of Deanna Lynn Bowdoin. Such a sad case on so many levels. Deanna sounds so wonderful and was so loved. She had her whole life ahead of her, but was brutally raped and murdered in her own home. Another heartbreaking aspect of the case is to read about her murderer, who had been failed over and over again by everyone in his life - his family, the authorities, medical professionals. Had just one person tried to help him, Deanna would probably still be alive today. Killer ended up spending years in solitary confinement while completely blind and extremely mentally ill. Died not even understanding why.
5. The Bellevue murders. Two 17-year-old boys who were fascinated by murder and planned to commit their own. All their friends thought they were all talk. One friend of theirs, Kimberley, went to the park with them one evening and they killed her. They then panicked, realising that she'd probably told her family she was meeting up with them that night. So they broke into her family's home and killed all of them too.

The whole story is crazy and awful. It's more interesting because of the killers. One of the killers flat out denied he did it for years. This guy seems to have been the leader, the one whose idea it all was. He refused to accept any responsibility and seemed to genuinely consider himself an innocent victim. The other killer admitted everything and seems vaguely intrigued by the whole thing. Like... "Yeah, I did it, but I have no idea WHY. It was so weird. I can't really believe I did it." He's not really sorry or anything. He doesn't seem to feel bad and he hasn't apologised to the family or friends of his victims. He's just more like ... I killed 4 people for no reason. Huh. So weird. I wonder why I did that.

I could probably go on but this has already turned into a bit of a weird essay.