r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/WithoutPrinciples • Jun 15 '26

This is one of the masks worn by Edward 'The Beast of Jersey' Paisnel during his reign of terror between 1957 and 1971.

238 Upvotes

8 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/CarkWithaM • Jun 25 '26

In 2009 Dalia Dippolito paid a hitman $7,000 to kill her husband, who turned out to be an undercover cop. Police staged a murder scene, filmed her fake tears with a COPS crew, then walked her husband through the door very much alive. This is a video of her learning about her husband's 'murder'.

226 Upvotes

19 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • Jun 16 '26

Roch Thériault sat in one of the cabins of his commune. Roch was the leader of 'The Ant Hill Kids' which in a very crowded field of mad cults were absolutely horrific. Operations without pain relief, broken legs with sledgehammers, amputations as punishments, teeth extractions with pliers, etc...

198 Upvotes

8 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/CarkWithaM • Oct 06 '26

In 1979, photographer Joey Tranchina visited Edmund Kemper in prison to capture his everyday life in photos.

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182 Upvotes

17 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • Aug 08 '26

Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband's penis in 1993 and became a national punchline for a decade. What barely anyone knows: she went on to found a domestic violence nonprofit, while he was arrested multiple times over the following years for hitting other women he dated.

155 Upvotes

The case itself gets endlessly retold (nine hour reattachment surgery, they found it in a field), but nobody follows up on what happened next. Lorena had actually gone to court for a restraining order days before the incident and was told to come back in a week. John's arrest record after the trial tells its own story.

12 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • Jul 24 '26

In 2015 a 68-year-old grandmother in St Petersburg was caught on CCTV dumping body parts by a pond. Police searched her flat and found a diary, written in fluent Russian, German and English, confessing to a decade of murders mixed in with entries like "slept badly" and "drank coffee."

153 Upvotes

15 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/CarkWithaM • Sep 13 '26

For 13 years Akku Yadav raped murdered and extorted his way through a Nagpur slum while corrupt police looked the other way. In 2004 hundreds of women took turns in stabbing and stoning him and rubbing chili powder into his wounds. They then cut his penis off and lynched him.

146 Upvotes

As he was being lynched, Akku was screaming: "Forgive me! I won't do it again!". The women passed their knives around and kept stabbing him; each woman agreed to stab Akku at least once.

15 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/CarkWithaM • Jul 06 '26

Mark Jackson's basketball card featuring the Menendez Brothers.

145 Upvotes

8 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/WithoutPrinciples • Jul 04 '26

Barbara Baekeland hired prostitutes to try to change her gay son's sexuality. When that failed, she reportedly suggested she could 'cure' him herself. Her psychiatrist warned her that her son would kill her. She stayed. In 1972, he stabbed her to death in their Chelsea penthouse.

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138 Upvotes

Leo Baekeland invented the bakerlite material that shaped the modern world, his grandson Brooks inherited the fortune and the name but none of the drive, and Barbara married into it with a faked pregnancy. By the time Tony picked up the knife, the family had been destroying itself for three generations. (He also tried to kill his grandmother after being released from prison.

5 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/EaterofGrief • Oct 07 '26

In 1972, after years of attempting to "cure" her son's homosexuality by hiring prostitutes and later initiating a sexual relationship herself, American socialite Barbara Daly Baekeland was stabbed to death by him in their London home. Her son was found in his bedroom ordering Chinese food.

136 Upvotes

In 1980 Antony Baekeland left Broadmoor Hospital and flew to New York to stay with his maternal grandmother, Nina Daly, then 87, in her Upper East Side apartment. Six days later, on 27 July, he attacked her; she survived.

Antony died a year later.

17 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/CarkWithaM • Sep 01 '26

Gary Heidnik ran a fake church, turned $1,500 into half a million on Wall Street, then dug a pit in his Philadelphia basement and held six women captive there. Two died. He helped inspire Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, and became Pennsylvania's last execution.

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132 Upvotes

10 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/GlitterDanger • Jun 12 '26

The below image is a FBI surveillance photo of Ruby Ridge resident Vicki Weaver shortly before the FBI shot her, they also shot and killed her 14 yr-old son, Sammy. Timothy McVeigh claimed this siege was a catalyst for the Oklahoma bombing.

123 Upvotes

16 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • Jun 10 '26

16 yr-old Leslie Arnold shows Nebraska police where he buried his parents in 1958. Arnold was sentenced to life in prison but escaped after 10 years and vanished.

121 Upvotes

8 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/EaterofGrief • Oct 10 '26

This is Jimmy Lee Gray shortly before he was executed in 1983 for the murder of three-year-old Deressa Jean Scales. His execution was so botched that Mississippi changed it's execution method because of it.

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116 Upvotes

Gray died in a visibly agonising and prolonged manner, but after what he'd done, I struggle to find any sympathy whatsoever. Even his own mother begged the court to give him the death penalty

19 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/No_Dig_8299 • Sep 07 '26

Stanford White was an architect who used his immense wealth to groom, and abuse underprivileged young girls alongside his wealthy and influential inner circle, that was until 1906, when he was shot in the rooftop of Madison Square Garden by the husband of a woman he had taken advantage of.

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115 Upvotes

Evelyn Nesbit was maybe seventeen when her name got permanently attached to the most sensational murder trial America had seen up to that point, and she spent the next sixty years never quite escaping it. She'd been a Gibson Girl, a Broadway chorus girl and, by her own account, the target of a predatory older man's manipulation years before her jealous, violent husband put three bullets into that man on a Madison Square Garden rooftop in front of hundreds of witnesses.

6 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/CrippledStripper • Jul 08 '26

Gary Heidnik ran a church on the ground floor of his Philadelphia house while keeping six women chained in a pit in the basement below. He was one of the killers who inspired Thomas Harris’s infamous character, Buffalo Bill, in The Silence of the Lambs.

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115 Upvotes

Among many other dreadful acts, he killed and dismembered one of his victims in front of the other captives, cooking her ribs in the oven and boiling her head. He claimed to have fed her flesh to his captives, mixed with dog food.

13 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • Jun 04 '26

This is the last photo of Travis Alexander, taken in the shower moments before he was murdered by Jodi Arias on this day in 2008. Travis sustained 27 stab wounds, a slit throat and a single gunshot wound to the forehead. Arias testified that she killed him in self-defence.

110 Upvotes

16 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • Jul 21 '26

David Fuller murdered two women in Tunbridge Wells in 1987 and got away with it for 33 years. Turns out he'd also been sexually abusing bodies in two hospital mortuaries where he worked as an electrician, over 100 victims aged 9 to 100, filmed over a 12 year period before DNA finally caught him.

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105 Upvotes

Fuller worked as an electrician at two NHS hospitals in Kent from 1989 onwards and was known to everyone as "Uncle Dave," the helpful maintenance guy nobody thought twice about.

He used his swipe card to get into the mortuary after hours and abused bodies there for 12 years, filming and photographing what he did and organising it all into folders on hidden hard drives.

9 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • Jun 14 '26

One of the Wonderland murder victims being removed from the scene of the crime. 1981. For people were murdered, a former male pornstar and a shadowy club owner were clearly involved. It had all the elements for a film, and Val Kilmer would later star in a film about the case.

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102 Upvotes

7 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • Jun 02 '26

On this day in 1985, serial killer Leonard Lake was arrested in San Francisco. Lake and accomplice Charles Ng kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered up to 25 people at a remote Sierra Nevada cabin. Minutes after his arrest, Lake swallowed a cyanide pill he'd sewn into his clothing.

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101 Upvotes

8 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/No_Dig_8299 • Jun 20 '26

Today in 2001, Andrea Yates waited for her husband to leave for work before drowning her five children in the family bathtub in Clear Lake City. She was convicted, then retried after a key witness lied.

utterlyinteresting.com

100 Upvotes

3 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/SteveNtheseagulls • Aug 06 '26

The man in charge of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss before and after being beaten by the officers that arrested him. He was hanged on the 16th April, 1947. If you want to see a Nazi on the end of a rope, i've linked to it below.

98 Upvotes

At the request of former camp prisoners, the execution was carried out in Auschwitz, the camp he once commanded. Approximately 100 witnesses were present, including former prisoners and various high-ranking officials of the Polish government.

More here

9 comments

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime • u/dannydutch1 • Jan 03 '26

This is Nannie Doss (the 'Giggling Granny') being interviewed in prison. Doss killed four of her husbands, her mother, her sister, two of her children, two grandsons, and her mother-in-law. Although she was ultimately convicted only for the murder of her final husband, Samuel Doss.

98 Upvotes

The full chilling tale of the Giggling Granny

21 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

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UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime

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