What’s the most shocking thing to happen in your neighbourhood/home town.

[Choclabratwatowner88]

Had the police around earlier to fill in a quick questionnaire in regard to a serious incident that just happened locally. As we live on the main road they wanted to know if we saw anything, the usual. My mum then pipes up that’s she’s been through this years ago when they were investigating a murder in our home town (not our current hometown) I was shocked as I’m 37 and never heard of this murder in my whole life, granted I was 3 at the time but still… things like that usually spread for years. I then went down a rabbit hole, turns out the murder happened right across the street from our old estate. The woman murdered was called Penny bell. She was found stabbed more than 50 times in her car, they still haven’t caught the killer. I never knew this whole time and it kinda threw me.
what’s the most shocking thing to happen in your hometown?

Although not my home town, I now live in the area where Colin Pitchfork committed his crimes. I know people locally who knew him and were very shaken up by what happened.

And there was a homophobic murder in the town I grew up in.

I remember the news when Paige disappeared. I can’t believe that was nearly ten years ago now!

Same
I wonder if we live in the same town !

Novichok. It felt even closer to us as me and my eldest were in town just before they were found and had walked down the same area. Only heard about it when we got home.

@828Pax small village . husband and wife marriage troubles he was sleeping on the sofa. ( from the outside most didn’t know about these troubles )
He adored his child .
One morning he was found dead on the sofa.
Apparently stabbed himself in the chest .

Everyone was shocked at the idea he would have risked his child finding him . Didn’t think he would .
Wife was questioned on murder , let off . Body released and buried although case was never closed .

@Choclabratwatowner88 also before I was born. A lady was raped and murdered it is spoken of being the Yorkshire ripper .

We went on to have an episode or taggert filmed in my old primary school

Where I used to live several children and two relatives were victims of an arson attack. My kids, much younger then, went to school with three of the young victims.

Very different scenario to most of these. Lots of people’s homes were flooded here last winter despite ample weather warnings because some idiot forgot to shut the floodgates as the river rose.

NC.

I grew up in Bradford at the time that Peter Sutcliffe committed his murders. I was born, lived and had family in the places where he was born and where he murdered - Bingley, Keighley, Heaton etc. My father went away to university as a mature student in Sept 1980 and my parents moved my mother and I out of the city to a rural area as they were so worried. They knew several women who were convinced they'd been followed by him or narrowly escaped attacks. I think he was more prolific than we even know now.

My first school game at age 5 in Sept 1980 a couple of months before he was caught was one where my friends and I would imagine we'd seen the Yorkshire Ripper and run across the playground to call the police from an imaginary phone.

It's now known how botched the police investigation was but by the very end Bradford Met knew the appearance of the person they were looking for. My mother was working in central Bradford and she had a colleague who looked just like him. The Police hauled her colleague in on a weekly basis towards the end of the investigation and my mother covered his work. They used to plan it on Monday as they knew he'd be taken in again by the end of the week. Sutcliffe was caught by chance in the end of course.

The car park at the front of my mother's workplace is still women-only and security lit and patrolled to this day. It's like a memorial to that awful time.

Decades later as an activist feminist I was able to help some women who had been arrested for protesting around the case in Bradford at the time clear their names. That was immensely satisfying - those women, now in their seventies and older, had got criminal records for trying to protect female like my mother and I.

I grew up in an American suburb of big houses with quite a number of families and a few empty nesters. One couple up the road sold their house and the new people did some work in the basement and discovered a bricked up body. Turns out the previous owner had murdered his business partner.

Not me (I moved away years ago) but my ds

He'd not long got a rescue dog (who is a sniffer-he cant go more than a few steps without sniffing and/or peeing) and was out and about in york with the dog

He had to go and deal with something for work at an address in or near leeman road and had taken the dog to give him his walk and to do what it was that needed doing

To get there from the direction he was coming from,you have to walk/drive through a long tunnel and you come out close to where he needed to be

Anyway,the dog was having his usual sniffing routine and not being in a rush,ds let him get on with it and they where moving slowly down the road

He heard what sounded like fireworks as he was near the other end of the tunnel

Turns out it wasn't fireworks,it was gunshot

If the dog hadn't been pissing about and sniffing every blade of grass/leaf/lampost/random anything that caught his nose,ds would have come out of that tunnel just as it had been fired and may have been caught up in it all

You can imagine how panicked I was when I got the phone call

'Hiya mum,you ok?rocco has just saved my life...!'

I dont think anyone was killed but a man was seriously injured (I do hope he pulled through)

Gunshot in the middle of the day in a normal street-it should be unheard of

The shooting of Jill Dando. I think of her everyday as I walk past the road

When I was a kid and lived in a very well to do leafy suburb, a house on our street was set on fire by accident by burglars. Burnt to the ground. The burglars had fled and broken into our garage on the way and left some stolen rugs in our garden. Another one in the same street, our local post office was robbed and the rumour by us local kids was that the robbers had dropped the loot in the area, so we were out all weekend scouring the forest for looted money

In our current home, London zone 4, quite leafy nothing really springs to mind except the usual helicopters, localish stabbings and usual cart thefts and burglaries.Only find out via various local facebook groups. luckily nothing has affected us personally

Novichok!

David Harker he used to be friends with my parents. He killed Julie dismembered her body and bragged about eating parts of her.
We moved from the little village not too long after. The only ones in our family to leave that village. It takes hold of people it seems haha.

There was a man who used to be in the army I think he lived not to far from us he shot his whole family then himself I believe.

Mary Bell also but that was before I was born. I was friends with the girl who's mam is one of the boys Mary murdered.

Raoul Moat he lived up the road from me.

There was a man named Lee Irving who had disabilities, a few nasty evil people pretended to be friend him, kept him in their house, took his money out his bank, eventually killed him, put him in a pushchair, left him to be found.

A few minutes walk from where i now live,there was a family

Mum,dad and 5 kids

I'd been at work the week before and they'd come in

The parents where loud and entitled-all 'you!there!get me some ketchup'
'You!clicks fingers get me some napkins'
"'Oi you!I need this mess cleaning up'

The kids where sat in a line and mute-not one made a sound (which for 5 young kids is very unusual,ive never seen children so quiet)

I commented to my colleague how unusual it was and she agreed and they finally left

I see it all at work (retail) but it stuck in my head as it was unusual and I commented to dp when I got home that night

A week to the day later,their house burnt down and the parents and one child (the youngest) got out-the other 4,very sadly, died

The landlady of a local pub was very vocal in helping the parents (and the local community was very helpful) until it turned out the parents smoked that many cigarettes,one had 'caught' and burned the house down

Ss had been involved heavily but didnt see what was in front of their faces-the dc had been badly neglected and the reason reason they had been so quiet that day is they couldnt speak-they just grunted or pointed instead

They went to nursery in the same nappies they'd gone to bed in,where very dirty,not fed properly (the benefit money was spent on cigarettes rather than the dc) and the parents just screamed at them rather than talking to them or ignored them

The father had done all the talking and hoodwinked ss (the same bullshit of 'lessons will be learned' was trotted out again)

The little one was put into care and the parents moved away

I have no idea if they where prosecuted but they should have been

Huddersfield. I used to live about a mile away from the school. 😞

I came on to say this too. I can't believe this happened in sleepy Salisbury.

una’s town? If so hello from a fellow local

The Christopher Halliwell murders in and around Swindon.

I used to work in the nightclubs in Swindon. Becky was a friend, always stayed behind for a drink with all the staff. Often spent the night on one of our sofas.

Christopher didn’t just use that name - he used Ian. He used the Ian name to get bar work and cash in hand jobs in the clubs.

We all knew he was a creep and had reported him to managers and police.

We were often ignored.

When he was arrested we contacted the police and gave lots of information, dates, times and locations.

It was all ignored or classed as “low level”.

We know deep down that he killed other girls and the possible location but the police refuse to investigate further.

Babes in the wood murder .

Someone was stabbed to death by a stranger late at night by the side of the road. I actually drove past the scene of the crime about 30mins after it happened and saw all the police cars. I was about 30mins later than I'd intended, I sometimes wonder whether anything would have been different if I'd left on time.

A Basque terrorist who'd been living in the next street incognito was also arrested.

At uni during freshers week a student was murdered by his housemate.

I watched a YouTube video about this only yesterday. Crazy!

I remember that. There was a series of women who’d discovered their hair had been cut whilst sitting on the bus.

Very possibly