Have you ever known someone who committed a serious crime?

[TheGhostsOfMeAndYou]

I’ve been listening to a true crime podcast recently and it got me thinking. One of the episodes was about Fred and Rose West. When Fred was first arrested (at the stage where police had only uncovered three bodies in the garden), his brother and sister-in-law spoke about him and said they couldn’t believe he’d done what he was accused of, as he had always seemed so gentle and polite spoken.

It made me wonder — has anyone here ever known someone who’s committed a serious crime, and did it come as a total shock? Or were there warning signs in hindsight? Did you ever suspect anything at the time? And how did others around them react — was it disbelief, or did some say they weren’t surprised?

I had regular dealings as child with someone who turned out to be a serial killer.

In my own family there’s been someone who has been jailed for serial non violent sex offences and someone who was jailed for manslaughter. Also there was someone who was convicted of drug offences but the drugs killed them before they were jailed.

It doesn’t bare thinking about.

I lived next door to him and his wife for 6 years. Would always chat and ask how they were, their children and grandchildren visited regularly. When I found out I felt physically sick, the thought of him potentially watching my young daughter play in the back garden etc made my stomach turn. I moved very shortly after.

Probably outing but anyway: I worked with this bastard back in around 2007 and yes, he gave me the creeps. Especially when I was told about his Christian volunteering work in Indian orphanages. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/ernest-fenwick-macintosh-acquitted-too-ill-1.5289105

We also bought a house off this bloke and his wife, a few months before his arrest. Apparently there were loads of journos doorknocking our street, but we were out at work so missed it all. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/3673531.stm

Yes, a lawyer who stole from the client account…jailed and an ex husband defrauded HMRC got away with it. An uncle sexually assaulted me, but mother didn’t care. She preferred him to me anyway

I watched this the other night and wasn’t convinced by the crocodile tears. Also agree they were let off lightly. Such a sad, sad story. And his poor wife.

Someone I know worked with Dennis Nilsen, an ordinary sort of man though very intense about union matters. He was interviewed by police and it was upsetting because bits of it covered food brought into work for staff parties.
In two separate schools I worked in serious fraud was carried out by finance admin staff.
I used to work in a school where a very disturbed boy was a pupil. This was year 7 or 8. Other pupils were very scared of him. He was always on guard and stony eyed. He was intelligent, able and very good in music and sports. In the staffroom one day the boy was being discussed. A teacher said that the boy wouldn't make it to the end of schooling, and he would attack a member of staff and it would be a woman and he'd murder someone one day, probably a woman. All his predictions came true. The boy is still in jail serving several life sentences.

Damien Bendall. Poor Lacey wasn’t his bio daughter. She and her brother were Bendall’s partners kids. It was sickening.

A former colleague with whom I was close, we didn’t work for the same company, he was a consultant and we spoke and emailed multiple times a day. If we went out to a meeting, we’d go to a cafe beforehand and travel in each other’s cars. Inevitably, we exchanged personal information, it was a very pleasant working friendship, I thought he was a complete gentleman. It turns out that he not only kept, but made pornographic photos of children and animals, thousands of them. He didn’t even get sent down, his defence was that he’d been stressed and in a dark place. I cut ties obviously. I went through a sort of bereavement, I missed the person he was to me despite being beyond repulsed by his true colours.

My Mum interviewed Maxine Carr for a job at BHS in Scunthorpe. She didn’t get to know her well and didn’t offer her a role. Mum was interviewed by the police about it before the trial

My mum used to have a lodger when I was around 20, the lodger was a man about 6 years older than me. He lived in the room directly below my bedroom and I had known him since I was a child, as he lived next door to my childhood best friend when he was a teenager. He lived in a room in my mum's house for a few years and always seemed like a nice, quiet chap, and would have his young children round to stay at weekends sometimes. A few years after he moved out it hit headlines that he had drugged and abused around 30 children and made thousands of videos of it. He got life in prison and I hope he rots in there forever.

Someone my brother went to school with murdered his parents!

I am probably going to get a lot of people bitching at me for saying this but ‘child porn’ isn’t an appropriate term. It’s child sexual abuse images.
Porn is consensual and they are children so they can’t consent. Sorry!

I know people with criminal records and who have been in prison but not for anything truly shocking or awful.

Three spring to mind.

A friend of a friend who “inherited” a large sum from her aunt and lived the high life for a couple of years until she was convicted and sent to prison for defrauding the company she worked for of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

My adopted sister’s father beat her mother to death and did a stretch for manslaughter. Hence the reason she was in the system.

Most recently, the head teacher of my kids’ school was found guilty of sexual activity with a child under 13 and is awaiting sentencing.

As you say, “they walk among us”.

Oh yes, I'd forgotten - DH was involved in supervising the PhD of one of the men who tried to drive a car bomb into Glasgow Airport in 2007. He did not survive the burns he suffered.

MIL is currently spending a decade in prison for child sex abuse. She is a church going "butter wouldn't melt" doesn't even swear, little old lady 🤷

Hooray for that!

The BBC report is quite colourful:

Despite his severe burns Kafeel Ahmed carried on fighting as they tried to pull him away from the car.

Alex McIlveen told a BBC documentary in 2008: "I was pure daft because I gave him a kick in the crotch.

"He didnae flinch. He didnae move nor nothing. I gave him a good kick as well."

McIlveen tore a tendon in his foot when he kicked Ahmed in the groin.

Yeah, I think I'd have kicked him too. DH said he didn't even know the man was religious.

An elderly friend of mine (now deceased) confessed to me that he'd been involved in what he thought was a murder, when a 'hard' friend of his dealt summary justice to someone he assumed had been trying to break into his car. The really weird thing is that the body never turned up (I think they threw it in the sea) and there's no trace of the person ever being reported missing.

I did wonder if my friend was spinning me a line, but he was deadly serious about it and I've often thought about looking into it myself (all happened I think back in the 60's/70's somewhere in the North of England), because it's a puzzle and someone must have missed the person killed.

An episode of Vera in the making!

I know someone who I met in the,past few years, absolutely lovely bloke, and only recently found out he was in prison for large scale fraud. But he has totally turned his life round since and raises money for prison charities/works as a mentor erc and is very candud about his past mistakes. A (rare) example of the justice,system actually doing what it should. Unfortunately a huge percentage of released prisoners go on to reoffend and bounce back into prison.

One of my best friends growing up, her brother was a little delayed mentally, nothing too drastic, but he was in what was known then as the retarded class (awful term, can’t believe that’s what it was actually called). He was easily lead into doing stupid things and was naughty. He got a job working in the kitchens of a hotel on the moors, quite isolated. Anyway, him and another worker did stupid stuff all the time and were pretty unreliable, the landlord ended up firing them and they murdered him. I wholeheartedly believe, my friends brother just went along with his friend, who was military trained, but he, quite rightly I might add, there were reasons but no excuses to his behaviour,, got a life sentence. Blew my mind.

Yes. Someone who was a well known member of the community charged with sex offences. Kept in custody for his own safety until his trial. Awful. You just never know.

A former colleague was arrested at work for major international bank fraud. He had 'fled' South Africa and the police caught up with him after 2 years. He later committed suicide sadly. I also work with someone who was in the class that Maxine Carr was TA for, and knew Ian Huntley. She says Ian Huntley just seemed normal but she didn't like Maxine Carr at all.

I mean wtf?! You really just cannot trust anyone. Obviously I don’t expect you to go into details, but (just roughly) what happened? Was it images or actual contact with a child? Some of these posts turn my blood cold.