I'm convinced every small town has some messed up unsolved murder. In my home town we had the "Gypsy Hill Killer" back in the 70s who was only caught somewhat recently due to DNA. However as a kid there was a whole urban legend that if you drove around Gypsy Hill at midnight you'd see a woman in a white dress covered in blood and if she looked at you, you'd die! (Now granted this is probably because Gypsy Hill is a super windy road and so a lot of fatal drunk driving accidents happen there.)
People from small towns. What was your "who killed Laura Palmer" mystery?
Discussion/TheoryThat one is awful
I just read about that one. I can’t believe the woman who orchestrated it all only got 10 years. She’s already served her time and is a free woman now. I wish she would have gotten life. It’s not fair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaratuba_child_murders
There were kids murdered on the 1990s. The mayor's wife and daughter and a bunch of guys were then framed by the police as having killed them in satanic rituals. A few years ago a podcast reviewed the case and changed public perception, as it ended up uncovering tapes which proved the suspects were tortured, among other major investigation issues.
O caso Evandro!
Jesus!! That's awful... Thanks for posting the case.
The Springfield Three of Springfield, Missouri is a pretty famous cold case. Never solved and never likely will.
Not sure if this counts, it’s a pretty small town, but occurred in 1946 before my time. However, talk of the killings and identity of the killer still ring through the town today.
The Texas phantom slayer. AKA: The Texarkana Moonlight Murders. Inspired the movie “The Town that Dreaded Sundown”
His identity was never truly uncovered, though over 400 suspects were arrested and questioned over the course of the investigation. The killer attacked 8 people in a 10 week period, killing 5. He was a “lovers lane” killer, who would prey on young couples who park their cars on scenic drives or overlooks that were known to be kissing/hangout spots.
Youell Swinney was first linked to the crimes through statements his wife made against him and circumstantial evidence found at the scene, but when she refused to testify against him at trial, and evidence came to light that he was in San Antonio with his wife the night of the 3rd incident, the prosecutors decided to pursue other charges to put him behind bars as they feared he was still a threat to the town (he was a career criminal). It is also debated if the first and fourth attacks were committed by the same perp or not.
Proto-Zodiac Killer vibes with this one.
Both movies (the 1970s original and the sorta sequel from 10-15 years ago) are very good.
That movie freaked me out
My townhome community in the mid 90s was a weird place. Within a matter of 3 or 4 years:
A young boy was killed on the turnpike that runs along the back of community property. He was hit multiple times (I believe 7). Nobody stopped. 2 young boys were present and witnessed it. Those boys were changed forever and both have now passed on as well.
There was a double-murder/suicide. A father shot his wife and newborn, set the house on fire, and shot himself. That took place on a row of homes adjascent to my family’s at the time. Thankfully the fire didn’t spread. Good firewall material apparently.
There was a lifeguard at the community pool that summer who attempted insurance fraud by blowing his own car up and blaming it on the neighborhood teenage vandals. He had also staged vandalism against the pool and other things in advance. I was actually the main kid blamed for the explosion. Lucky for me they found him out.
There was a night in early spring when my friend and I were walking down the main road within our community and a completely nude woman just came running from behind a set houses, across the road directly in front of us, and toward a wooded area that then leads to the turnpike. Totally silent except for her heavy breathing and barefoot stomping on soft grass. Never did learn who she was but
I’m pretty sure it was that woman’s husband who was forcefully removed from his home by a federal agency in the middle of august later that year. My friend and I watched from across the street. At the time I remember a friend had read in the news that he had been making threats to the president. But my memory is that those men were wearing ATF jackets. So, maybe?
Those were some traumatic years jesus. Being a latchkey suburban rat at that time, you’d often get front row seats to all the crazy bullshit. Never quite thought of it, but “the Bob years” would perfectly describe that time in that particular neighborhood.
I have to say, some of this sounds like Stephen King stuff but the latter half of your post touches upon some Twin Peaks territory with even more disturbing implications.
That naked woman story sounds exactly like what Lynch experienced as a kid, which also inspired a scene in Blue Velvet.
Never heard about this. Do you have any more details on the story? Sounds very interesting.
Lynch has described this in interviews before but also in his book Room To Dream. I can't fully remember the details but he was out at night with a friend in a suburban neighbourhood as a kid. A naked woman walked out into the street with wounds on her (?) and it left a massive imprint on him.
Holy crap that does sound awfully similar. I gotta go find this story
Hey found this while looking for the story: https://www.reddit.com/r/davidlynch/s/dnk0cpZ631
Oh yea. I vaguely remember hearing about this. Thanks buddy.
A foreign exchange student at my high school went missing during her shift as a lifeguard. She was found two days later a few hundred yards away in a small patch of woods, nude and with both hands missing.
Back in the 1990s I went to a small-town high school with a budding serial killer. 😬
Andy Wynkoop, this creepy guy who was a couple of grades ahead of me, killed his 13-year-old GF and then, a few days later, a 20-some-year-old woman that he picked up from a party.
I was at that same party so I had to do a police interview and answer a bunch of questions, like they do in the movies. I didn't know anything, though, other than to confirm that I saw both him and his victim attending the party. I wasn't friends with him or anything; in a small town you know everyone and everyone tends to party together.
At first they thought the girls were just missing, but both of their remains were eventually found on opposite ends of a local state park. They figured out who was guilty right away, and he readily confessed to what he did, adding that he “thought the world was overpopulated” and that he would do it again and again if no one stopped him. 😬
It was heartbreaking and surreal to say the least.
Clipping from a Detroit newspaper about his first victim.
As a side note, the town where I live also happened to be where John and Patsy Ramsey had their summer home - right across the street from my grandparents house. After JonBenet was killed, sometimes my grandpa would have to oust the paparazzi from his property because they liked to hide in his bushes to try and photograph the Ramseys.
TL;DR: I went to school with a would-be serial killer and JonBenet Ramsey’s family summered across the street from my grandparents.
I listened to a podcast about that dude.
Do you remember which one? I wouldn't mind checking that out. It was all such a blur back when it was happening. It would be interesting to hear an outside perspective.
Ooh boy, I honestly can’t remember. I frequented so many true crime podcasts over the years. I’m thinking it was possibly True Crime All The Time or Casefile, but I can’t be sure.
I will see what I can find, thank you!
A few years back a little boy went missing. It was a whole ordeal and thanks to facebook it became a shit show. Half the town thought the family did something to the boy, or were all over the police for it being an incompetent investigation.
The boy was eventually found in the chimney of a house across the street that was vacant at the time. Apparently he had climbed to the roof and tried to get inside from there but got stuck.
No way to know for sure if he was just a curious kid or if he was hiding or what not
But the rumors and gossip and air around the whole thing was real vile
And then everyone forgot about it of course
A group of drunk teens in my hometown were speeding in a speed boat and all got decapitated by a low bridge at night. The boat kept going with their headless bodies. Seems like something that would happen in Lynch world.
Jfc
Not from a small town, and one of them was before my time, but I think our most famous murder mysteries were these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Cara_Knott
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Danielle_van_Dam
I lived just like a mile or two from the crime scenes (literally both) for quite a bit. Of course the first one was before I was born, apparently the cop who killed her was even making himself quite the public figure around that time. But I was also just a short walk away from the neighborhood where Danielle van Dam had lived. I believe w the mystery didn’t last long though, David Westerfield was a person of interest from the very start.
Don't forget Chelsea King and Amber Dubois. Chelsea's body was practically in my back yard
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Albert_Gardner
I was friends with Stephanie Crowe
Yeah Chelsea went to my high school, I think she was 1 or 2 years under my grade. Didn’t know her myself but I had a couple friends who had classes with her. That event also permanently made me hate 4chan, because when someone had set up a facebook memorial/discussion page for all her classmates and family to post photos of her and share memories, it got bombarded by a wave of 4chan trolls who spammed it with Pedo-Bear memes and photos of the killer with a Seaking Pokemon (I guess their pun was based on saying chel-“Seaking”) with him saying “I caught a Seaking!”
Then whenever anyone would post a comment on frustration, the 4chan users would then thoroughly dox that person (many of them traumatized 15, 16, 17 year old children grieving the violent death of a friend) and then bombard them with prank phone calls pretending to be the rapist or pretending to be her ghost, and even just ordering copious amounts of pizzas and sending them to the kids houses.
I always hear about all these glorified stories of 4chan getting justice against awful people or doing heroic things, but the fact that this wave of trolls came from there, and yet I heard nothing about these supposed “White Hat” 4chan heroes actually doing anything to get their own house in order and handle these people and the situation overall, tells me all I need to know about that site.
I'm a few years older and have never heard about that, it's fucking sick and awful. I used to run into Amber's stepdad around town, he is incredibly gracious and forgiving.
There's still conspiracies around Stephanie's death, no one can agree on who they think is responsible
Ironically, Michael Palmer
https://charleyproject.org/case/michael-timothy-palmer
I was in his age range when he disappeared, and it was big news that pervaded that summer.
One of the reasons Twin Peaks appealed to me so much was that I'm also from a small, kinda weird town in the middle of wilderness.
Oddly, his brother went missing 11 years later.
I'm from southern Portugal, so that would be Madeline McCain...
Another case from Portugal, a disappearance rather than a murder but with some similarities, the Rui Pedro case. Also disappeared.
Madeline, we know the story. Rui Pedro was allegedly groomed by a neighbor who allegedly sold him to traffickers. But nothing was ever proven.
Madeline, we know the story.
There's been so much written but I never followed the story enough to form an opinion. What do you believe?
Accident or OD, parents covered up.
Assaria, Kansas. Yes, that’s the name of the town. Not a joke. But there was a woman my family used to live only a few miles from. Her name was Lori Heimer and she was a dog breeder. In 2016 she got brutally by either an axe or machete. I don’t know if they ever conclusively said. They’ve never solved it. The posters asking for any information still hang up in town, and in Salina, which is just down the highway about 10 miles. It’s haunting. My band and I played a charity gig for the family.
In the tiny town a lot of my family ended up moving to (small population but very very spread out middle of nowhere type shit), there was a land dispute and a guy ended up getting his head cut off and thrown down his own well. They couldn't get the head out so it just... stayed down there and they filled the well in. Nobody was ever caught for it. Nothing ever came of the land dispute either. My aunt ended up buying the property and moving her family into a doublewide there, and there were some minor quibbles about where her property ended and where the neighbors' began, but pretty much everybody had either gotten too old to give a shit or passed away by the time my aunt got the property. I thought this was an urban legend or something when I was a kid but turns out it happened sometime in the 60s.
My dad came from a small town (like population 500 small) and during his senior year the high school burned to the ground. Nobody found out who did it. It was really sad.
Not a small town but my mom was friends with a girl who worked at a donut shop who got abducted and murdered by a family of serial killers whose whole thing was killing girls who worked at donut shops. Fucked up stuff. I won't name names but you can find more if you know what to look for. My mom was really paranoid about me going out when I was young, and in retrospect, I get it.
This next one is very tangential and also extremely sad but it's very literally our 'real life Laura Palmer' incident.
The story of Laura Palmer is less a story about murder and more of the unspoken sexual abuse of children, in my opinion. It makes people uncomfortable because "real American" types talk big about how it's bad but will do illogical things to protect pillars of their community if accusations get thrown around. The sexualization of children is a deep rot of American society and is often rather ignored instead of dealt with.
Laura in my town was the daughter of a motel owner, one who would make some special deals with certain patrons. I still remember her glazed-over expression in class growing up. Her reality was an open secret in town, where everyone sort of knew what was going on but never, ever spoke about it. I wonder how she's doing now...
Midsize town but the disappearance of Zebb Quinn
Kara goes missing in 2007 and everyone suspected the boyfriend did it, fast forward to 2016 and another girl he’s linked to goes missing. Mushroom hunter finds both bodies
The Ski Wing Murders. Two shot execution style working at a ski resort. A safe was stolen as well.
Airtight Bridge. Dismembered corpse was found along the banks of the river in 80's. ID'ed her as a missing person from a town a few hours north. Was a mystery until 2017, looks like they charged the missing persons husband with the crime.
It's a weird little area, seems unnaturally quite down there.
Niqui McCown. It's been over 20 years and the only person of interest died years ago. It will likely never be solved, unfortunately.
The one that personally shocked me the most was the killing of my former nanny and her 2 year-old boy. But they solved the case - it was, obviously. a former boyfriend who couldn’t accept it was over.
We've had a lot of teenagers commit suicide by jumping in front of the train. Or overdosing. I often have wanted to do both. It's really weirdly common that people here are super messed-up but the town looks spiffy and upscale and ritzy on the surface.
Arlin Henderson went missing near where I grew up, and I was around his age when he disappeared...
Ozzie the Duck was killed at a local park in my hometown. Not sure if they ever found the person or people that did it but it was a big thing in local news for some time.
The Collin thatcher case in my hometown was pretty infamous, but it wasn't a young girl. It was his wife. My hometown isn't the innocent town I grew up in now either. There's all these homeless people, and nowhere to put them because we don't have a proper shelter. Lots of addiction. So it kind of reminds me of what twin peaks turned into in season 3
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Jay_Cook_and_Tanya_Van_Cuylenborg
My mom went to school with them and when this happened it shock our city. I'm a true crime person so this case always carried with me because oh hiw brutal it was I 100% thought it was a serial killer. With the catching of the Golden state killer and Genealogy they caught Jay and Tanya's killer 31 years later and this was his only crime he ever committed and I'm so happy they got closure
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Reena_Virk
Reena's case is I think closure to Laura's in that it's a teen girl found in a body of water but this one is rough as I believe all but one of the people who murdered here are out free which bis so upsetting. In all honesty we have a few more cases that some times end up on true crime lists so that fun/s ;-;
These are the two that came to mind
I'm from Coquitlam in Canada, real PNW vibes, and at one point in the 1980s we had two serial killers (Clifford Olson, Robert Pickton) and a serial rapist (John Horace Oughton) operating at the same time. Leonard Hogue also killed his whole family in 1965, Iain Hunt (allegedly) killed his wife a few years ago, and Bruce Blackman also killed his family in the 1980s.
Funnily enough, members of my family were neighbours with both Pickton and Olson, and one even rode in his car on occasion as a child. Anyways yeah, there's a surprising amount of notable murders for a suburban town like this.
I’m from a small border town. Rgv, Texas. About an hour from South padre.
Every week there is a missing girl.. very sad but there is one that stands out. I don’t remember her name but, these situations happen a lot but. Apparently she was was from my neck of the woods and decided to go to Mexico for some fun (a common thing where I’m from)
Well she never came back, they found her beheaded and raped. I’m not sure if beheaded or dismembered but it was very fucked up, turns out she was messing with the wrong ppl in Mexico.
Also. This lady in Tijuana. Was caught on video crying and hyperventilating saying she saw a truck full of dead, dismembered children. A few days later she was found dismembered, stuffed in a suitcase with a note that said “this what happens when you see things you shouldn’t see”
Ooouyyy cuuucuuy!
I’m from the Albany area - Hazel Drew’s murder in 1908 was quite literally the inspiration for Twin Peaks! Co-creator Mark Frost used to spend his summers in the area, and has talked about drawing inspiration from this case for Laura Palmer.
My wife’s hometown had a doozy
https://www.newstimes.com/news/article/maryann-measles-case-timeline-106795.php
So, SEVEN people killed her? Why?
Two of them had raped her and she’d reported it. It was revenge and to prevent her from testifying. They also gang raped and tortured her. They were awful.
(Edit - in fact all the men had raped her; she had not reported all of them)
JFC
Watching Twin Peaks for the first time with my wife (then girlfriend) between the arrests and the trials was something
one of them also raped her after she was dead, and another kept her body in the trunk of his car for 3 days before dumping her in the river.
and her bus driver found her body.
the reason why is mostly drugs. they were dealing and figured statutory rape charges were going to fuck things up for themselves and for their boss. but killing her was actually one of the girlfriend's schemes. she was super pissed off at her bf and got them all charged up and orchestrated it saying she was going to kill her. but she didn't have to kill her, the guys did it.
super disturbing all around.
Amy Mihaljevic, a 10-year-old killed in the outer suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. Unsolved to this day.
For my town, it wasn't unsolved. It's on record. Back in the 30s, the Klan Even the mayor was complicit in it. And they were still active up until the 80s. If anything, the mystery is if they're still around here today.
In my lifetime, a homeless man supposedly went crazy and set fire to the local bar. But I knew the bar owner, who was constantly doing all sorts of get-rich-quick schemes and such, I would absolutely not put it past her to have burned it down for the insurance money and blamed it on the local homeless man.
Location not included bc I'm not too comfortable with that, but I sold a murderer the equipment he used to bury his victim in our hometown 👀 So about 15 years ago, a guy who lives here murdered his mistress. Really vicious, there were rumours he bit off her ear and all sorts. Poor woman. Anyway I was working at a hardware store at the time and whenever a customer bought, for example, rope with a bunch of lime and a shovel, we would share a little jokey joke. I'd ask them who's pissed them off, with a little wink, and we'd laugh. Except for this one guy, who got weirdly mad about it. Now we all know why 🙁 Needless to say I never made that joke again with a customer!
We had BTK but then they found him.
The witch hunt known as the West Memphis 3
While not a small town, I grew up in Bridgeport CT and we had a girl go missing in the summer of 2001 named Bianca LeBron. She showed up to school that day, said she was going shopping with her “uncle”, left the school and no one has ever seen or heard from her ever since
Teekah Lewis https://www.missingkids.org/blog/2024/taken-from-bowling-alley-teekah-lewis we are from the same town and the same age..
Also Kyron Horman I think his mother did something to do him though so that leaves less to be answered for me https://fox59.com/news/national-world/search-continues-for-kyron-horman-oregon-boy-whose-2010-disappearance-made-global-headlines/amp/
During the annual Fourth of July carnival a fifteen-year-old boy was kidnapped, assaulted and killed. People suspected the carnies. The carnival was never allowed to come back to town. Many years later, a serial killer confessed to the murder.
I live and lived in the area where the nightstalker killed people. The San Gabriel Valley. People were on heightened alert. So during this time I was about 15 or so and one evening me and some friends are riding our bikes and a woman comes out of her house screaming they are dead. She ran next door to a neighbor who called the police. 2 teens and the mother (grandmother) were killed. So that freaked us out, turned out it was a student who killed them over fucking football pads. And Richard Ramirez was finally caught in East LA.
Used to live in a town up in Virginia called Abingdon, everyone always jokes “if you’ve been to abingdon, we’re sorry!” But when I was in middle school we had an exchange student at my siblings high school from Germany (IIRC). Kid got attacked by several racist students one day and passed away. Took the police weeks to weed out who did it, it was messy and riddled with inter-student drama.
I grew up in the Golden Horseshoe region of Ontario. Paul Bernardo was more than enough monster for a lifetime around here.
Not exactly a small town but there was a much-publicised murder where the victim was abducted less than two minutes away from where I lived at the time.
The police found the murderer pretty quickly and he confessed to that killing and another one that happened four years earlier. Despite him literally leading police to where the earlier victim was buried, he was only tried for the later murder initially due to police procedure being followed; the confession for the earlier murder happened without a legal representative being present and therefore couldn't be used as evidence.
He was eventually convicted of both murders after a very lengthy legal battle and the detective who got the confession is seen as a local hero even though he didn't follow proper processes to get it. He's also linked to several other cold cases but they're still being investigated.
My small town of Palmyra, PA we had a really terrible case, in some ways similar to Laura. One of my brother's high school friends, Kourtne, went missing. She has never been found. It was turned into an episode on Cold Case (tv show). Her family still hangs "Missing" signs all around town, and at the post office. The reward keeps going up but nothing. Everyone I know has a theory on who did it. The boy friend. The neighbor. It's just really sad and affected a lot of my brothers friends and their families over the years.
It's been like 10-12 years now I think!
i am commenting so i can easily come back and read these stories
The town I’m from was in a very rural area on the outskirts of a desert. Decades before I was around, there was a woman who was supposedly a witch living in that desert. Remains of her shanty home and yard are still there beside a dried up curled over tree.
She rode a horse into town for supplies rarely, purchased with very little money she somehow had from somewhere. For the most part she lived off the land with a very small yard of a farm with something like a couple goats, the horse, a cow and a couple sheep. She probably caught and ate rabbits and other desert animals and she apparently grew her own vegetables somehow. My mother said she saw her a few times on her horse headed into or leaving town but never saw her close up or spoke to her. Stories about the witch had been told since I was young. One that my mother told me one time was that some of her peers from school in the town went out to try see the witches place at night. Not to make fun of her or anything, just out of some kind of childish playful curiosity and excitement.
The story I was told was that one night the small group rode bicycles out of the town to the desert, along the track they heard would get them towards the witches place. When they reached the turn off to a smaller dirt path which would lead them through some dunes deeper into the desert to the witches house they dumped their bikes to keep as quiet as possible. They dared not speak as they crept through the dunes silently under the moonlight, following the path through the soft pale slopes. As they reached a large flat area of moonlit sand there in the middle was the black tree and the crooked house. They all dropped down to the ground, suddenly exposed against the white sand dunes under the moonlight. Apparently they could make out the glint of what might have been a row of jars on her porch step. One of them whispered “get back get back she can probably see us!” All the kids scampered backwards into the dunes watching the house in terror as the glow of a small oil lamp floated from inside the shanty towards the wire mesh window of the wooden front door, which abruptly flung open with a metal scrape and clamber of the wooden door banging against the front of the house as the witch rapidly emerged, storming across the wooden boards of her doorstep out onto the moonlit sand. The lamp they saw was now gone and instead she had a rifle in her hands, which she aimed up into the air and fired, illuminating her terrifying scowling face for a moment as the kids bolted back into the dunes. All the way back to their bikes which they rode as fast as possible back to the town.
The witch wasn’t seen in town for months after but she did come back in very rarely, but not as often as before.
There are a bunch of other events and weird things that happened in the town I’m from but I personally like the witch stories the most.
The 1978 Burger Chef Murders, Speedway (Indianapolis), Indiana. The robbery and kidnapping took place in town, but the victims were brought to my area, then quite rural, and murdered execution style. Never solved.
I don’t know if this counts, but a few years ago someone skinned a cat alive two blocks from my house. I don’t think they caught the perpetrator.
I used to take Hawaiian dance lessons from her mom for years, she always had a giant picture of Pammy on stage. I remember a memorial they had for Pamela Allen at the beach.
We don’t have an “unsolved murder”, but a murder that was solved, the culprit was imprisoned but he refuses to tell anyone where the bodies are. It’s honestly really sad the families have never been given closure unfortunately.
I grew up and still live in Western WA about 40 miles south from where they filmed Twin Peaks. I remember growing up hearing about the mystery of the Green River Killer for years. When i was a kid i thought it was some sort of green monster lurking in the river rather than a man. He was convicted of killing 49 women. I'm sure there were more victims that were never found as well.
"Who took Cherrie Mahan?"
The fun one: Theorosa's Bridge
The not-so-fun-one: BTK.
And a twist: Murder of Phillip Fager family. Butterworth was acquitted, BTK mailed at least one letter to the surviving spouse Mary Fager, but no one else has ever been charged or convicted.
There weren’t really mysteries but there were some shocking and tragic crime events at my rural Pennsylvania high school, many of which revolved around drugs and underage sex trafficking kinds of stuff. The show seemed to depict it from a distance, but FWWM nailed the vibe of our high school underworld.
For my area: Zodiac.
Other: I semi-recently heard about missing and murdered Native American girls being trafficked in the Great Lakes region and thought of Laura
April Jones. She went missing, there was a huge search, and it transpired someone abducted her, killed her, and then attempted to burn her body in his woodburning stove.
Policeman accused of killing his sister in law but it's labelled as a suicide and also linked to the death of a prostitute which is in the article as well.
I didn't know about this even though I went to high school with one of his kids.
He wrote a book that's meant to clear his name I think.
Nothing ever seemed to happen with the protitute found down mineshaft either. So who knows.
A guy was found chopped up and stuffed into a trash can floating in our reservoir. It had something to do with a business deal that fell apart
Not a murder, but we had an incident of someone keeping the corpse of a dead relative in their home, and after it was determined it was of natural causes no charges were filed.
I’m thinking failure to report a death, the health hazards of keeping a rotting corpse in a building and similar things would lead to charges, but what do I know?
When I was in middle school they found amother student’s body in the town’s creak. We even got the day off of school like how the principal in Twin Peaks cancelled school for the day.
There were a lot of suspicions but I think it was ultimately found to be a suicide.
A little more Dear Meadow-y than Twin Peaks, but an unsolved murder in Madison Co. Arkansas, known locally as "Booger County", checks all the boxes of backwoods, drug-fueled, everyone-sleeping-with-everyone murder and intrigue. Probably involved the long-time sheriff, who later died somewhat mysteriously in a flash flood.
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/1997/oct/19/meth-and-murder-madison-county/
We had a girl about two years younger than me kidnapped and killed in our hometown when going to the store to get candy. We lived in a small town of 28k. It was crazy and all over the news. Never found out who did it. It happened in the early 1990s.
Not my town, but the county I live in Disappearance of Damien Nettles
Brittanee Drexell. Finally solved. And I thought the falsely accused Suspect was Rail Roaded. When the remains were found, the falsely accused Suspect's Mother was so graceful and kind at a Press conference. Saying this has been hard on Brittanee's Mom. And her own Family as well.
And the Heather Elvis case... Two Suspects are doing time. But still no sign of Heather after all these years. I remember them searching for her. I hope one day her Family finds Closure.
This wasn’t my town but near Browns Chicken Massacre
This was nearby me. https://www.uspis.gov/history-spotlight-2023/rondout-train-robbery
The Rondout Train Robbery which was the biggest train robbery of all time and one of the most lucrative heists
A movie w Matthew McC called The Newton Boys was made about it
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_Weger
The Starved Rock Murders HBO MaX has a documentary on it
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Not far from me in Holland, Michigan. The Janet Chandler case pretty horrific and her life mirrors Laura’s pretty closely in terms of having this good girl image that most people had in their head then there was the dark side some people really knew about her.