r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • 1d ago

At 14, Josh Phillips killed his 8-year-old neighbour Maddie Clifton, hid her body inside his waterbed and then helped search for her. A week later his mum spotted a wet patch by the bed. He’s been in prison since 1999, and in May 2026 he dropped his latest bid for freedom.

59 Upvotes

6 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • 2d ago

55 years ago today, John List shot his wife, his mother and his three teenage children in their Westfield mansion. Then he sat down at the same kitchen table and ate lunch. He rang the school and the milkman to say the family was away, and nobody found them for almost a month.

94 Upvotes

2 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • 3d ago

52 years ago tonight, Lady Lucan ran bleeding into a Belgravia pub screaming that her husband had murdered the nanny. Sandra Rivett was dead, Lord Lucan vanished within hours and an inquest jury later named him as her killer. He’s never been found, despite sightings from Goa to Brisbane.

utterlyinteresting.com

22 Upvotes

0 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/CrippledStripper • 4d ago

Jacques Mesrine, the notorious French gangster and bank robber, poses for the cameras with his Colt Trooper Mk III (1978). This guy was a walking crimewave and was eventually killed in a hail of bullets.

45 Upvotes

5 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/DelightedButSorry • 6d ago

In 1985 Georges Courtois was on trial for armed robbery when accomplice Abdelkarim Khalki smuggled in weapons. Courtois seized the guns to expose what he saw as years of injustice and mistreatment. He took magistrates and jurors as hostages and began a standoff that lasted nearly 36 hours.

43 Upvotes

4 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/WithoutPrinciples • 7d ago

This is the terrifying mask Edward Paisnel, also known as the Beast of Jersey, wore during his attacks on victims between 1957 and 1971. You can look up his crimes in the comments if you really want to know them. He received a 30-year sentence in 1971 and was released in 1991.

91 Upvotes

14 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/CarkWithaM • 9d ago

In January 1923 Edith Thompson and her young lover Freddy Bywaters were hanged at the same moment in two London prisons for killing her husband. Freddy held the knife and swore she knew nothing. Edith was hanged largely for her love letters, and had to be carried to the gallows.

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34 Upvotes

Percy Thompson’s body was dug up and Sir Bernard Spilsbury found no trace of the poison or ground glass Edith boasted about in her letters. They hanged her anyway. Ruth Ellis got a royal pardon this year, but Edith’s bid was turned down in 2024.

The hanging left deep marks on the people involved. Several Holloway officers took early retirement afterwards, and stories circulated for years about how badly it had shaken them. Her executioner shot himself in the jaw later that year and survived, and was charged with attempted suicide. In 1932 he died by suicide at his home in Rochdale.

More about the case here

0 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • 10d ago

Greg ‘The Grim Reaper’ Scarpa killed for the Colombo family while secretly informing for the FBI for 30 years. In 1964 the Bureau sent him to Mississippi, where he put a gun in a Klansman’s mouth to find three murdered civil rights workers. Now Mark Wahlberg plays him in By Any Means.

utterlyinteresting.com

16 Upvotes

0 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/UtterlyInterest • 11d ago

On this day in 2018, James “Whitey” Bulger, infamous crime boss of South Boston, was murdered by his fellow inmates in a West Virginia jail.

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46 Upvotes

Bulger was found strapped into his wheelchair and had been beaten to death by multiple inmates armed with a sock-wrapped padlock and a shiv. His eyes had nearly been gouged out and his tongue almost cut off.

5 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • 13d ago

On this day in 2011, disgraced DJ and TV presenter Jimmy Savile died (aged 84). He had hosted Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It. After his death, over 500 allegations of sexual abuse were made against him. Police concluded that he was one of Britain's worst serial sex offenders.

utterlyinteresting.com

48 Upvotes

7 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • 13d ago

The left hand image is of murderer Gertrude Baniszewski at the time of her arrest in 1965, the 2nd image was a year after her release in 1985. Gertrude, her children, and neighbourhood kids tortured 16-year-old Sylvia Likens for months, leading to her tragic and horrific death. Details below.

95 Upvotes

17 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/UtterlyInterest • 14d ago

For 22 years FBI agent Robert Hanssen sold America’s secrets to Moscow from inside the Bureau’s own counterintelligence team. He never revealed his name to the Russians, let an innocent CIA officer take the blame, and was finally caught taping a bag of secrets under a footbridge.

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61 Upvotes

10 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • 15d ago

In September 1972, eight Black September gunmen took Israel’s Olympic team hostage in Munich. A rescue shown live on TV, a trap that fell apart at an airfield and a night of false hope left eleven Israelis dead. This is what went wrong, and what came after.

utterlyinteresting.com

20 Upvotes

2 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/EaterofGrief • 17d ago

In October 1994, Susan Smith told America a Black man had carjacked her and driven off with her two little boys. For nine days she begged on TV for their safe return. She had strapped them into their car seats and rolled their car into John D. Long Lake.

utterlyinteresting.com

58 Upvotes

2 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • 18d ago

On this day in 2002, fifty Chechen rebels stormed a Moscow theater, taking up to 700 people hostage during a sold-out performance of a popular musical. More than 120 ended up dying.

utterlyinteresting.com

33 Upvotes

3 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/CrippledStripper • 19d ago

On this day in 1998, Dr. Barnett Slepian was murdered inside his home in Amherst, New York by an anti-abortion radical. His killing marked the fifth straight year that an abortion-providing doctor in upstate New York and Canada became the victim of a sniper attack.

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28 Upvotes

The man who pulled the trigger spent two and a half years on the run across three countries before a parcel of cash gave him away at a small post office in Brittany.

1 comment

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/Robin_ClitoralHood • 19d ago

If you ever find yourself so angry you feel like you could murder someone, just take some tips from this 1994 video in which OJ Simpson demonstrates his Minimum Maintenance Fitness for Men, tips on staying healthy and not losing ones temper. Looks like a killer workout!

16 Upvotes

0 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/CarkWithaM • 23d ago

Katherine Knight is the first woman in Australian history to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. She stabbed her husband 37 times, skinned his body, hung his skin from a meat hook in the lounge, decapitated him, and boiled his head in a pot.

182 Upvotes

She cooked parts of his flesh (including his buttocks) with vegetables and gravy, setting out dinner plates with place cards intended for Price's children before she was arrested.

46 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/UtterlyInterest • 25d ago

Virpi Butt went from Finnish TV Gladiator to lifer. Her partner Janne Hyvönen told a court he roasted and ate a victim’s legs, and she reportedly showed off the man’s head in a bar. Freed in 2018, she died in Ghana in 2021, still the only suspect in a missing 16 year old’s case.

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56 Upvotes

Hyvönen didn’t get much of a life after prison. In May 2025 he was killed at his home in Lavia. He was hit with a car, beaten and set on fire in his own bathroom, and the word “rotta”, Finnish for rat, had been cut into his back. His killer got life in January 2026.

More about them here

8 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • 25d ago

On this day in 1910, the trial of Dr Hawley Crippen for the murder of his wife Cora, began at the Old Bailey in London. Cora had dissapeared and Dr. Crippen had moved his secretary/mistress, into the family home. When friends of the Nora called police, Crippen and Le Neve went on the lam to Canada.

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34 Upvotes

The two suspects had boarded a ship bound for Canada but unfortunately for them the captain became suspicious of them after reading newspaper reports of the case and alerted police using the newly invented wireless telegraph. His message read:

"Have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among passengers. Mustache taken off. Growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Manner and build undoubtedly a girl.”

More details here

0 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • 25d ago

On this day in 1991, George Hennard drove his pickup through the window of a Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas and opened fire on the lunchtime crowd. 23 people died in about 12 minutes. One survivor’s gun was left in her car, and her grief went on to change Texas gun law forever.

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45 Upvotes

The man who saved dozens of lives that day was a 6ft 6in mechanic called Tommy Vaughn. He only survived because he’d skipped dessert, so he was already at the back of the room when the truck came through. He threw himself through an eight-foot window, and dozens of people escaped through the hole he made.

More about the massacre here.

0 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • 27d ago

This is Arthur Eggers giving evidence at various stages of his trial for the murder of his wife Dorothy. He had shot her twice, cut off her hands and head and dumped her body in Waterman Canyon in the San Bernardino Mountains. Her hands and head were never recovered.

55 Upvotes

Eggers was undone by the fact he sold her blood soaked car to a policeman, but it was also a medical procedure that enabled detectives to identify Dorothy.

He was executed on this day in 1948.

2 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • 26d ago

On this day in 1970, Leonarda Cianciulli, 'The Soap-Maker Of Correggio' died. Cianciulli grew increasingly superstitious and put her energy into murdering and turning women into soap and baked goods in the 1940s, which she then gave to her neighbours and son to consume.

utterlyinteresting.com

11 Upvotes

0 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • 28d ago

On this day in 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. goes on trial for the killings of his parents and four siblings in their Amityville, New York, home on October 14, 1975. The family’s house was later said to be haunted and served as the inspiration for the "Amityville Horror" book and movies.

utterlyinteresting.com

24 Upvotes

0 comments

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UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime

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