Detective work isn't all fun and games. While many are entertained by a good mystery book, movie, or show, real life crime can be extremely disturbing. Some detective are unlucky enough to be faced with cases so violent and scary that it stays with them forever.
Redditor u/ThunderPheonix21 asked detectives to share the creepiest cases they've worked on, and professionals in the field did not disappoint.
20. A whole new warrant
"A lot of my work is actually based on cell phone dumps. I once got a request from a Detective to dump a guys phone because he was attempting to sell our county jail jumpsuit...
Problem was, there was way more on the phone that what we had bargained for. Turns out the guy was REALLY into under-aged girls. To the point that he had thousands of images of CP on the device. So I called the detective up and informed him that he was going to need another warrant to cover the CP for the device. So he did, and began creating a CP case against the guy."
19. A love triangle
"I once got a case spying on a lady's husband. She thought he is cheating on her. Wanted the proof to present before judge in court. While investigating I found the husband cheating on the wife with HER boyfriend! Both were having an affair with the same guy. Needless to say I minted money from all the three. PS. The boyfriend was also their divorce attorney!"
18. A crazy fetish
"Some guy was killing women by making them explode just right so he could keep the hands, he had a fetish with them."
17. This poor woman...
"Not a detective... but my uncle was a cop... Essentially they got a call to a house... the neighbour's had called the police and told them there was a strong Odour coming from the apartment next door. They got a little worried... as this was an older woman, who only really left her home for essentials...
Police get there... after many times knocking and calling... no answer. So they had the landlord unlock her door... they weren't necessarily thinking she was dead initially.... not sure how.. it's seems fairly obvious...
hey get inside, and the odour is just awful.. like burnt hair and cooked meat..."
"The woman was taking a shower... she went to adjust the heat to be more hot... she slipped and fell on a loofah that was on the floor of the bath. And hit her head on the tap... somehow in the fall she managed to turn the heat tap WAY to much.
Essentially... she passed out. And then died from brain hemorrhaging... and then the hot shower boiled her.... the hot water was running on her for about a day and a half."
16. Life is so short...
"Girl stopped breathing in her bed, potential suffocation murder.
Turned out to just be a lung failure but it still creeped me out."
15. The mole people
"Insurance adjuster here. I'm not a detective, but I do lots of fraud investigations. The ones that aren't fraudulent sometimes just turn out to be really weird. The winner for me hands down is the man who claimed he was terrorized by mole people...
My in-person interview was about two hours. I had more than enough in the first five minutes and was trying to leave for most of it, but he kept blocking the door or directing me to wrong way to keep the mole people off my scent. It was kind of sweet in a twisted way; he genuinely thought the mole people would come after me if I didn't follow his rules.
He directed me to park ye olde company car about a mile away on a concrete parking flat he had made. We couldn't walk on the dirt road there; the mole people constantly changed where it went. The claims he filed were all in similar veins.
We decided there was no fraud, but a call to adult protective services was merited."
14. A terrible accident
"Detective here, attached to a coastal town with a fishing wharf. Started work one day when we get a call from the water police who have responded to a abandoned boat floating off the coast. They have towed it into the bay where they requested our assistance and they would advise us further on arrival.
We head down thinking someone had stolen the boat or something else routine. When we get there we are told that no one went further than the enterance before it was sealed off as a crime scene. We have a quick look below the deck and see why..."
"3 people, clearly dead with one slumped over the wheel one on the floor and the other in a chair. No struggle, no injuries and nothing out of place. Completely silent other than the water on the hull and the fenders squeaking against the police launch.
Turned out to be an accident. Lack of upkeep on the very old engine meant fumes leaked in and the 3 were poisoned, at which point the engine just ran until the diesel was gone."
13. This close call
"Someone dumped a body in an alley right by the PD, but in a spot that no one frequented. So after a few days in mid-summer heat the body melted so bad they couldn't ID by looks or tattoos, just the clothes and hair, and DNA once they figured out who she was.
Long story short it was a serial killer who had dumped her, and they found CCTV of him stalking people at the local shopping center right after he dumped the body. They watched him spend over four hours walking around, leaving to his car and changing clothes/hat and going back in, following women for a bit, changing his mind... He left empty handed, and ended up getting caught a couple states away the following week.
Creepiest part for me was that I went shopping there the same day."
12. A story from Michigan
"My teacher was a detective and he told our class that one case that he wish he got but his partner or friend or something like that did it was called jack in the box and this guys wife killed her husband with help from some dude and then they put him in a locker and burnt him if your in Michigan you've probably heard of it"
11. This is horrifying
"I was working midnights in a neighborhood with a high violent crime rate, and we got sent to a dispute at a bar... We make our way through the bar systematically booting people out, and get to the bathrooms. I open the door to the men's room and it's empty (single stall bathrooms). My female partner goes to open the women's bathroom door but it's locked. She knocks on the door and a female says, 'I'll be out in a minute.'... Female partner knocks on the door again and the female agrees to open the door. When she comes out, we ask her what took so long..."
"She's not providing any substance in her answers. She's wearing tight yoga pants, and we notice that she has a large bulge in the back of her pants/crotch... When we question her about it, she's very evasive and won't answer us. Female partner begins to search her. As she pulls back the female's pants and shines her flashlight down to look, my partner says, '****!' She sees a baby arm sticking out from the female's vagina and up through her ass cheeks. This chick had been drinking and smoking crack all day. She had a stillborn and continued to stay at the bar and drink/smoke crack."
10. That's not a turtle...
"A buddy of mine worked on this
He said there was this guy who liked to shoot turtles on a pond on his property. He sees a turtle and shoots it 2 times with a .22 rifle. He had a hunting dog that would go fetch the turtles. He would make turtle soup with them
The dog goes out and gets the turtle and an arm pops up. The 'turtle' he shot was the back of the mans head who was dead in the pond."
9. Someone was watching
"My brother, not me. I usually tell this long and dramatic, but here is the quick to the punch version.
Schizophrenic woman reported being watched by ghosts at the abandoned funeral home...
Turned out when investigating, someone (or something. dum dum dum) was actually watching the people in her building and keeping crude log books of their coming and goings and left some of them in the place. My brother's theory was that they were discovered / almost discovered and fled."
8. That's a ton of money for cartoon porn
"I had a client whose employee had used the company account for payments to a graphic designer. Except instead of marketing materials, he had commissioned $15k worth of Loli and Sonic porn."
7. Sounds like an Alfred Hitchcock movie
"My boyfriend was the detective in this case. An officer doing a wellness check on an elderly woman spoke with her son. He said she was out at the moment, but she was doing well. He spoke in detail about what she was up to lately and all that. The officer noticed a strong smell coming from the yard though. I'm sure you see where this is going, as I don't think pretending a deceased relative alive to keep receiving their benefits is uncommon..."
"The officer turned the case over to a detective (my boyfriend), who returned with a warrant. There were two houses. A main house, and a small apartment-style house in the back yard where the mother once lived. When they entered, the son seemed calm. Showed them right to the mother. Continued to speak as if she was still alive and well. In the bed, they found the body, that had clearly been there for a long time. It was like a putrid puddle. The stench was unbearable. The son adamantly refused that she was dead. Insisting she had just been up and around the main house yesterday."
6. A surprise in the basement
"They were undercover in a mob and gathered enough evidence to search a house the guys used a lot - the search led them to a basement filled with water halfway up the stairs. They shone flashlights and didn't see anything at first, then saw something glinting in the water. They turned to go up the stairs to get a brighter light and along the walls and the door frame were gouges, the back of the door too. They got their bright lights and went back down and it turns out the bad guys had 2 crocodiles in there and when someone pissed them off they put them in the basement and locked the door. Gouges had skin particles in them."
5. A mystery tenant
"A friend of mine grew up in a big family house with her immediate family plus an uncle and grandparents. Sometimes her and her brother would wake up with things written on their faces in permanent text. Just random phrases nothing too shocking. The kids were about 8 or 9 years old, they both denied doing it and no one looked any further into it.
Anyway eventually the uncle is killed in his bed, stabbed to death. The police investigate and it turns out there's a dude living in their roof."
4. Cannibalism on the lawn
"We had a case where a guy killed 5 -6 members of his family and when the police came to the scene he was eating one of his family members on the front lawn, I suppose to get their strength."
3. How was this not in the news?
"I used to work with a retired LAPD beatcop of 30 years in his retirement funmoney gig working on an ambulance. He told me this story that sent chills down my spine.
He pulls over this sedan for expired tags, and neither the driver or passenger has any paperwork, driving illegally and they're both acting shady as ****, so he calls for backup, detains them, and searches the car....
He finds two dead young teenage girls in the trunk. They're naked, bound, and gagged and had been mutilated, and there was tons of devices obviously meant for torture..."
"He calls in the homicide detectives, and the cavalry comes, the two guys are hauled away to jail, and his day wraps up after all the normal procedures and paperwork has been filed.
And he says that was the last he ever heard of that case. Nothing. No subpoenas. No testimony to a grand jury. No interviews for the homicide detectives. No stories in the paper. NOTHING."
2. This killer wanted to be Dr. Frankenstein
"My dad was a detective and told me and my siblings briefly about a case where a killer would take a different part of each body. He had collected two legs, a torso, and one arm. His motive was that he wanted someone to play with."
1. A psycho with big plans
"Private investigator here. Looking into a liability stabbing case. They were blaming the apartment complex for the resident getting stabbed by another resident. Turns out the dude was planning a mass shooting and was part of multiple right wing white supremacist groups, Trump 2020 guy, wanted to attach a gun to a drone and kill a ton of people. Instead, he was so racist he couldn't help but stab his black neighbor before he pulled it off. His social media was essentially a manifesto and the cops found a bunch of firearms laid out, fully loaded and ready to go. I feel bad for the neighbor but their getting stabbed likely saved multiple people's lives."
Do you have something to confess to George? Text "Secrets" or "
" to +1 (310) 299-9390 to talk to him about it.
That's one way to do it.
The Weepy Voiced Killer. He killed young women, then called the cops and reported it himself. He even called police once they reported on it that they got the facts wrong.
God his calls were so unnerving. It was like listening to someone trying to force themselves to feel any remorse.
That's unnerving.
GiphyDennis Rader (BTK) was a family friend. Went to my Nana's church and did cub scout crap with my uncles. When he was caught one of my uncles was freaking out because "he taught me the knots he used".
- He had a camera roll full of pictures of him tied up, posing in the lingerie of women he killed.
- He used his jobs as an alarm tech and a city code enforcer to gain access to people's homes.
- If you want/wanted to write him in prison, you had to fill out an application. The dude is a convicted serial killer and makes you think you have to try and earn the right to write him.
The scariest ones of all.
Those who haven't been caught yet.
Of those, the sexual sadists scare me the most. The others you may have a fighting chance with. If you can convince them of your humanity, or otherwise break that sort of trance, there's a slim but real chance.
But not to a sexual sadist. As one forensic psychologist described it, imagine the tissue you used to blow your nose this morning. Did you think of it at all after throwing it out? That's exactly how sexual sadists treat people.
One of the most gruesome.
Tool box killers. The story is gruesome even the transcripts make my stomach turn.
Came here to to say this. Learning about these guys satiated my curiosity for the macabre. I have multiple family members in the FBI and they helped with research for my writing. I listened to part of the tape and read the transcript of the murder. I can't emphasize this enough, this is the absolute depth of human depravity. I don't want to go into detail, but your description of what these guys did to their victims is pg-13 compared to the reality of the viciousness of these murders.
Seriously, once I came across this stuff I stopped exploring this part of humanity.
I grew up learning about serial killers. I thought they were fascinating. Finally I found the true gruesome play by play description of these murders and just stopped and never looked back.
Seriously, when you hear someone scream the way their victim screamed on the recording the distinction between fictional murders and real murders becomes painfully apparent. Horror movies were my favorite genre growing up, specifically slasher films. Now I avoid movies like that. The crap you see in horror movies is nothing compared to what real life serial killers have done.
I can't exaggerate this. I've literally made a commitment to never tell anyone the details of what I've heard and seen.
The toybox killer and Albert Fish are two close runner ups. Fish was another sadomasochist with a passion for genital mutilation, for both himself and his victims. Toybox killer is a repulsive case study into the perversions of a group of a people.
But seriously, the toolbox murders are sick. From what I understand one of the investigators killed himself and named the killers in his suicide note as a reason.
This case is the best example for the idea that evil triumphs over good because good men rarely understand how truly wicked evil men can be. If someone put a gun to my head and told me to do what they did I would tell them to pull the trigger.
The Vampire of Sacramento.
GiphyI'm gonna go with cannibal and necrophile Richard Chase, the "Vampire of Sacramento". He's a super, super creepy dude, but also a little bit sad, in that he was obviously mentally cracked right from his youth and yet he was just kind of ignored and left to fend for himself. A few choice passages from his Wikipedia bio:
- "Once alone in the apartment, Chase began to capture, kill, and disembowel various animals, which he would then devour raw, sometimes mixing the raw organs with Coca-Cola in a blender and drinking the concoction. Chase believed that by ingesting the creatures he was preventing his heart from shrinking."
- "Later investigation uncovered that, in mid-1977, Chase was stopped and arrested on a reservation in the Pyramid Lake (Nevada), area. His body was smeared with blood and a bucket of blood was found in his truck. The blood was determined to be cow's blood, and no charges were filed."
- "He attempted to enter the home of a woman two weeks later, but because her doors were locked, he walked away. Chase later told detectives that he took locked doors as a sign that he was not welcome, but unlocked doors were an invitation to come inside. He was once caught and chased off by a couple returning home as he pilfered their belongings; he had also urinated and defecated on their infant child's bed and clothing."
- "Chase was arrested shortly afterwards - police who searched Chase's apartment found that the walls, floor, ceiling, refrigerator, and all of Chase's eating and drinking utensils were soaked in blood."
- "His fellow inmates, aware of the extremely violent nature of Chase's crimes, feared him, and according to prison officials, often tried to persuade Chase to commit suicide."
That's what's scary about them.
Ed Kemper, honestly he seems like the type of guy you'd strike up a convo with at the grocery store or some sh*t. He seems so sane when he talks if you don't think about what he really did. Very calm sounding. He's also 6'9 which is horrifying.
A spooky one.
H.H. Holmes and his Murder Castle. He had it built/modified with soundproofed rooms, secret doorways, hidden passages, airtight gas chambers, and chutes directly to the basement where he would send his dead bodies, dissect them, then sell the organs on the black market, sell the skeletons to medical labs and schools, and dissolve everything else in vats of lye/acid, or burn it all in the basement's crematorium.
He got away with a lot more than just murder. His entire life was just one criminal enterprise after another that he'd constantly get away with.
Mind-boggling, indeed.
GiphyJoseph James DeAngelo (Golden State Killer/East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker). Just mind-boggling how much misery he inflicted and how he got away with it for so long.
What maybe creeps me out the most about that guy is how he just stopped one day. Like, you think about serial killers, and you imagine that they're just crazy, or it's this intense compulsion that makes them do it. But this guy just stopped one day. Meaning, he could have stopped whenever, but made a decision to keep doing it. That really spooks me out.
One of the craziest cases.
Ted Bundy. Only because during his trials, even with all the evidence stacked against him, people (especially women) trusted him. Mostly because he "didn't look like someone who would kill". Meaning he was attractive to the female populace.
That's disturbing.
Robert "Willy" Pickton. From what I know, arguably Canada's most notorious and twisted serial killer.
Killed between 50 and 90 women and fed their remains to pigs, at his farm. If I recall correctly, he got convicted of 49 murders.
Creepy is an understatement.
GiphyCharlie Brandt
Killed his mother and tried to kill his father and sister as a teenager. Once out of juvie he went on to live a normal(?) life, got married and all that. At age 47, he butchered his wife and niece before killing himself. While investigating this it came to light he may have been connected to 26 unsolved murders in Florida.
Crime Junkie has a really good podcast episode on him.
One of the worst.
Ted Bundy, I live in Utah and people are very friendly and kind of naive sometimes. It's unnerving that someone like him could become part of the Utah/Mormon culture just to have access to young girls.
Also, he doesn't look creepy he looks really normal and was studying to be a lawyer. If I met him irl I probably never would suspect his evil motives. That kind of serial killer is really scary to me, the kind that blends right in.
How horrifying.
The Night Stalker. Would break into places and wait for so long to spring on his victims, and then he would tie them up and blindfold them and they would never be able to tell if he actually left or was waiting for them to move so he could kill them. I think about that sometimes at night and I find it terrifying.
My biggest fear.
GiphyI often think about this question. The Toy Box killer was already mentioned, and I agree that his torture methods are the worst. I would like to add Richard Chase, AKA " The Vampire of Sacramento", and Richard Ramirez, AKA "The Night Stalker".
Chase was severely mentally ill and unmedicated, and had a fixation on blood. Ramirez's upbringing is upsetting in itself, but someone breaking into my house and brutally murdering my family would be one of the most violating ways to go.
Kevorkian types.
Harold Shipman or any of those "angel of death" type killers. Insulin poison type killers I have no respect for. People like Kevorkian types the movie on him played by Al Pacino scared me and made me cry.
