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?

Aberfan. Until that summer my mother had been a supply teacher there and didn’t get the job when she applied. She was gutted but the whole class was wiped out. I was very young but remember it very well.

Murders of Renee and Andrew MacRae.

Leoni Keating? Her abduction and murder is one of my earliest news memories.

I remember this. I was a few years older but from the local area and had friends from the town. They spoke like they knew who was responsible but as far as I know, her killer wasn’t caught.

@AnneLovesGilbert Newry?

Amanda dowler went to my school. I was in a different year but got the same train. We always thought she had got into or been taken in a car. Years later we found out that she had been grabbed from next to the bus stop we all used to stand around/ sit at and walk past everyday. My best friend lived close by and did a paper run which included the building Levi lived in (and Amanda would have been in). So awful 😢

I'll never forget the shock of one of The Ripper murders happening in my home town & very close to my home, in a place I knew well.
I was at school & in the last lesson we were told to walk home in pairs... frightening times!

Sarah Payne murder.

The Novichok poisonings - very scary and surreal.

@AllJoyAndNoFun you live near me!!
There have been some other shocking incidents.
A woman was stabbed to death completely randomly by a criminology student on the beach while on a date; an 18 year old lad was stabbed to death in the town centre over a drug deal, a receptionist was stabbed to death by a man at the Travel Lodge… & there have been a lot of other stabbings recently.
A few years ago a young Chinese girl student was stabbed to death in one suburb when in the early hours when she resisted a man’s advances.
In the same suburb a single mother of two was found stabbed to death in her home & mutilated.
Back in the 90s / 00s an innocent man from London was shot dead by a gangster in a town centre nightclub. And our old teacher’s husband was stabbed to death in his garden by a drug addict who went to our school.
I will say though that we live in a lovely area and we have much less crime than the rest of the country; although we do have a huge drug problem here, & the fifth largest homeless population in the country.

The horrifically violent murder of Diane Sindall and the subsequent wrongful conviction of Peter Sullavan.
He was dubbed The Beast and The Mersey Ripper in local newspapers, he is now recognised as the longest-serving known victim of a miscarriage of justice in British history after serving 38 years in jail before his conviction was quashed and he was released.

Well remembered around here. RIP Arlene.

Salisbury? They made a really quite good BBC series about that - I was gripped. Must have been v scary to live there at the time though!

Peter Sutcliffe. I lived in Savile Park in Halifax in the seventies.

Blimey, lots of murders where I live, and it’s not that big a town. I live in a street of 60 odd houses and there have been three here alone! Actually 2 murders and 1 murderer. At least 1 from the 80s unsolved. Never really thought about it but it’s actually quite shocking.

Jesus.fucking.Christ

These are all so horrible and I don't know why I'm reading them late at night.
I woke up one school day to find we couldn't get out on school run- armed police were surrounding a house at the bottom of our road and had sealed off the road. Went on most of the day, a stand off. Postie told me someone inside had shot someone else with a crossbow. Presumably he came out in the end as they didn't go in screaming and shooting but case hasn't come to court yet so no more details! In my head it was probably a drugged up pair who ordered a Crossbow online or something and one of them shot the other by accident then panicked. But maybe it was deliberate.

A young woman was battered and stabbed in her house about 200 yards away, about a year ago.
Fortunately he was caught quite quickly and is in jail for many years. A really shocking incident. And it's a quiet area with a high proportion of owner/occupiers. The whole town was shocked by the level of violence.

We bought the house of a married couple. Not so long afterwards in their next house, the wife murdered the husband with a pair of scissors.

A woman in her eighties was tortured, raped and murdered in the town I worked in. It later transpired that it was the young father in a family I was working with.

Dunblane massacre.

just utterly tragic. I was in primary 4 when it happened and I remember my teacher telling us what happened. I remember going home from school and my mum just holding me crying. Couldn’t understand it.

after that the schools all got the alarmed doors.

I stayed 15 mins away. The beast who did it did a lot in the local area. He coached some kids I know football and said he was very inappropriate.

One place where I lived, a woman using the phone box was attacked by a man with an axe.
Another place I lived, a woman was attacked by her husband. Stabbed to death, he left her to be found by their young children.

Stately home, two brothers. Younger inherits, abuses kiddies, gets turfed out the house by elder brother. Just days before his trial he falls downstairs and sustains a life-altering brain injury. Dies a few months later after an innocent medication mix-up - he got given twice the dose by accident.

A drug related stabbing happened on the road the close my house joins onto. I could've seen it out of my window, it was that close.
A rape and murder was committed by a man who was supposed to walk my nan home that night. She said she got a weird feeling, and ordered herself a taxi for the very short distance.

When I was a young teen, I lived in a quiet very rural country town. There was very little in the way of crime. Quite a lot of us owned horses and loved riding, of course I wanted a horse too and there was a local riding instructor who used to ride along our road, one day my Mum had a conversation with her and she told Mum she had a horse we could buy cheaply. I was so excited!

A few days later we heard she had been murdered, shot in the stomach at her house and she bled to death. The perpetrator was a youngish man who was thought to be 'harmless' but had gotten his hands on a shotgun and for reasons no-one knows, shot her. It was awful. Needless to say I never got the horse.

I saw the man get killed by the two XL bullys in Staffordshire and there was a man who murdered his wife about a year after. I live in a quiet village. Didn't expect that at all