New York City experienced one of its most infamous crimes on April 19, 1989 when a 28-year old woman named Trisha Meili was raped and severely beaten while jogging through Central Park. The attack left her in a coma and she had no memory of the incident after she recovered. Five Harlem youths – Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, and Kharey Wise—had been in the park the night of the attack and were brought in for an interrogation. With the exception of Salaam, they would each make videotaped confessions to the crime. The Central Park Five were all tried and found guilty and given sentences ranging from five to thirteen years.

However, all five youths would recant their confessions and claim they had been coerced and intimidated by the police. Their statements were not consistent with the physical evidence and the prosecution downplayed the fact that none of the DNA from the crime scene matched them. In 2002, the DNA did wind up matching a convicted serial rapist named Matias Reyes, who finally admitted to the crime and confirmed that he did it alone. By that time, the Central Park Five had already served their sentences and been forced to register as sex offenders after being released. On the basis of Reyes’ confession, their convictions were officially vacated.

On July 8, 1997, a Norfolk, Virginia woman named Michelle Moore-Bosko was found raped and murdered at her residence. A neighbor named Danial Williams and his roommate Joseph J. Dick, Jr. were soon brought in for questioning and confessed to the crime. Since no trace of their DNA was found at the scene, police were forced to look for other suspects, and Dick eventually named two more accomplices, Derek Tice and Eric C. Wilson, who subsequently confessed to being involved. Williams, Tice and Dick were sentenced to life imprisonment while Wilson received 8 ½ years. All four men claimed that they only confessed and pleaded guilty after being threatened with the death penalty.

The separate confessions of the Norfolk Four all seemed to contradict each other in their details, and naval logs showed that Dick was serving on the U.S.S. Saipan at the time of the murder. An inmate named Omar Ballard eventually confessed to committing the murder on his own and his DNA was present at the crime scene. However, the Norfolk Four remained incarcerated since police still maintained that they acted as Ballard’s accomplices. Wilson was released after serving his sentence, and Tice, Williams and Dick would receive conditional pardons from Virginia governor Tim Kaine in 2009. However, the Norfolk Four are still required to register as sex offenders and they continue to fight to clear their names.

It’s bad enough when a coerced confession sends an innocent person to prison, but it’s especially horrific when it sends them to death row and almost costs them their life. On June 4, 1982, 19-year old Rebecca Lynn Williams was raped and stabbed to death 38 times inside her Culpeper, Virginia apartment. One year later, police turned their attention to a farmhand named Earl Washington Jr., who was in custody for another crime. After interrogating Washington for two straight days, he eventually confessed to five different crimes, including Williams’ murder. The other four confessions were thrown out, but he was still sentenced to death for killing Williams.

Washington had an IQ of 69 and was coerced into making all his confessions. His initial confession to the Williams murder was filled with inconsistencies and he got many key details wrong, including the race of the victim and the location of the crime. His execution was ultimately halted when a fellow death row inmate named Joseph Giarrantano contacted a law firm to file a habeas corpus petition on Washington’s behalf. In 1994, Washington would receive clemency from the governor of Virginia and had his sentence commuted to life in prison. It was not until DNA testing proved he wasn’t the perpetrator that Washington was finally granted a full pardon and released after serving 17 years. The real killer of Rebecca Lynn Williams has never been found.

On April 13, 1986, the small town of Aurora, Missouri was shocked when one of its most respected citizens, 79-year old Pauline Martz, was murdered. She had been beaten and burned alive when the killer set her home ablaze. Acting on an eyewitness tip, police were eventually led to a 20-year old resident named Johnny Lee Wilson and after being interrogated for nearly four hours, he confessed to the crime. In order to avoid the death penalty, he would enter an Alford plea and was sentenced to life in prison.

However, Wilson suffered from mild retardation and had an IQ of 76. He was threatened and intimidated by police during his interrogation and thought he would be allowed to go home if he confessed. The details about the murder were clearly fed to him and he seemed unaware of what he was doing when entering his plea in court. Wilson also had an alibi for the time the murder took place and the eyewitness who implicated him was another mentally challenged man who later admitted to lying. A convicted murderer named Chris Brownfield eventually came forward and confessed that he and an accomplice had killed Pauline Martz during a robbery. In 1996, Johnny Lee Wilson was finally granted a pardon by Missouri governor Mel Carnahan and released after serving nine years.

On November 8, 1983, a Fort Lauderdale woman named Susan Hamwi was found stabbed to death with a butcher knife in her home. To make things even more tragic, her 18-month old daughter, Shane, died of dehydration in her crib after being neglected for several days. Police investigated a neighbor named John Purvis, who suffered from schizophrenia and was looked upon as the town “weirdo”. Even though there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime, Purvis would eventually confess to the murder and was sentenced to life in prison.

However, because of his schizophrenia, Purvis had trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. The first time he was questioned, Purvis’ mother broke up the interrogation when she saw detectives attempting to intimidate her son. The next time they brought Purvis in for questioning, they made sure mother wasn’t present and he was coerced him into making a taped confession. While Purvis was in prison, authorities seemed disinterested in pursuing other potential leads that popped up. The investigation was not reopened until 1992 when evidence came to light that Hamwi had been murdered by two hitmen who were hired by her ex-husband. They would soon be convicted of the crime and in January 1993, John Purvis was finally released after serving nine years.

The Juan Rivera case is a prime example of how much weight a false confession can carry. On August 17, 1992, an 11-year old girl named Holly Staker was raped and murdered while babysitting in Waukegan, Illinois. A tip from an informant eventually led authorities to 19-year old Juan Rivera, who had an IQ of 79 and was in custody on a burglary charge. He was questioned for four straight days and reached the point where he experienced a psychotic episode and started banging his head against the wall. Authorities eventually coerced him into signing a confession and he was sentenced to life in prison for the crime.

In 1998, Rivera received a retrial because his first trial was littered with procedural errors. This time, the prosecution produced one of the kids Staker had babysat as an eyewitness. Even though he was only two years old at the time the murder took place, his testimony helped convict Rivera a second time. In 2005, DNA tests excluded Rivera as the perpetrator and he was granted a third trial. Remarkably, he was found guilty again because the prosecution claimed that Staker had consensual sex with someone else that night… even though she was only 11 years old! It was not until January 2012 that the charges against Rivera were finally dismissed and he was released from prison.

On November 15, 1989, Angela Correa, a 15-year old resident from Peekskill, New York, went missing while on her way to class. Two days later, her body was found in a wooded area. She had been raped, beaten and strangled to death. At her funeral, police noticed that one of her fellow students, 17-year old Jeffrey Deskovic, was crying profusely and became suspicious when they discovered he’d been absent from school during the time Correa went missing. Deskovic was questioned on eight separation occasions, and on January 25, 1990, he was administered a polygraph test without a parent or counsel present and told he had failed. After being interrogated for six hours, Deskovic finally confessed to the murder.

Before the trial, DNA testing was done on semen samples and it excluded Deskovic as the perpetrator. However, the confession strong enough to garner a guilty verdict from the jury and Deskovic received a sentence of 15 years to life in prison. Like the Juan Rivera case, prosecution pushed the theory that the victim had consensual sex with someone else before she was murdered. It would be 16 years before new DNA testing was done and it wound up matching Steven Cunningham, a convicted inmate who was serving time for another murder and subsequently confessed to killing Correa. In 2006, Jeffrey Deskovic was finally exonerated and released.

On September 28, 1973, 51-year old Barbara Gibbons was found murdered at her home in Canaan, Connecticut. Her throat had been cut, she had been sexually assaulted, and there were numerous injuries on her body. Her body was discovered by her 16-year old son, Peter Reilly, but police were suspicious by his supposed lack of emotion and immediately brought him in for questioning. After failing a polygraph test, the exhausted Reilly was interrogated for several hours. He eventually came to believe the police’s assertion that he had blacked out and forgotten he committed the murder, so he signed a confession. Even though Reilly would later recant his confession, he was still convicted of first degree manslaughter and received a sentence of 6 to 16 years in prison.

In 1977, Reilly was granted a new trial after evidence was uncovered that a state trooper had seen him driving his car five miles away at the time the murder was supposedly taking place. The judge decided to clear Reilly of all charges and criticized the authorities’ handling of the case. The state police has always maintained their position that Reilly was the real killer and while he has made many attempts to find out who really killed his mother, authorities have always refused to release their files about the case and Barbara Gibbons’ murder remains unsolved 40 years later.

The town of West Memphis, Arkansas was shaken on May 6, 1993 when the naked bodies of three murdered boys—Christopher Byers, Michael Moore and Steve Branch—were found in a drainage ditch. One month later, police brought in 17-year old Jessie Misskelley, Jr. for questioning, and he eventually confessed that he and two other teens, Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin, had murdered the three boys as part of a satanic ritual. The West Memphis Three were soon charged and found guilty of the murders, with Echols being sentenced to death.

However, Misskelley quickly recanted his confession, which was filled with inconsistencies. He had an IQ of 72 and appeared to have details of the crime fed to him during 12 hours of interrogation. There was no DNA or physical evidence to link the suspects to the crime scene, and more compelling evidence seemed to point towards Steve Branch’s stepfather, Terry Hobbs. The “Paradise Lost” series, a trilogy of documentaries about the case, garnered national exposure for the West Memphis Three and much outrage about their convictions. In 2011, a deal was reached where the West Memphis Three would be released from prison if they entered an Alford plea, officially pleading guilty to the crime while maintaining their innocence. Even though they are now free, they have never been officially exonerated and the real killer of the three boys remains unpunished.

In the early morning hours of November 1, 2001, sports editor Kent Heitholt was beaten and strangled to death with his belt in the parking lot of the Daily Tribune in Columbia, Missouri. The case remained cold until 2004 when a young man named Chuck Erickson told police he believed he had repressed memories of having committed the murder with his friend, Ryan Ferguson. After being interrogated, Erickson was eventually coerced into making a full confession. Ferguson was charged and given a 40-year sentence for the murder while Erickson received 25 years.

However, there was no physical evidence to tie either of them to the crime scene and the validity of Erickson’s confession has been questioned. He was a known drug and alcohol user with a history of mental illness and could not provide accurate details about the murder until they were fed to him by police. The only other piece of evidence was the testimony of a janitor named Jerry Trump, who claimed he saw Ferguson and Erickson in the parking lot that night. However, in 2012, Trump claimed he had been coerced into naming them by the prosecutor, and both he and Erickson would give sworn affidavits recanting their testimony. Even though there is no longer any evidence to tie Ryan Ferguson to the murder, all attempts to secure him a new trial have been unsuccessful and he remains in prison.

Robin Warder is a budding Canadian screenwriter who has used his encyclopedic movie knowledge to publish numerous articles at Cracked.com. He is also the co-owner of a pop culture called The Back Row.

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In 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the “North Side Phantom” stole nearly $20,000 worth of jewelry in more than 40 burglaries over several months. Witnesses couldn’t agree on a description. The thief was shot at, but never hit. Police investigation came no closer to identifying the elusive housebreaker until he was caught and arrested. The North Side Phantom was Vincent Donnelly, an 18-year old escapee from the state’s juvenile delinquent facility. After his escape, he slept in the cellars of unoccupied houses in the area and robbed others with the help of his accomplices, four other boys and a girl. To add insult to injury, he stored most of his loot in the basement storage locker belonging to a policeman.

In 1951, Los Angeles women found themselves literally under fire by a “Phantom Sniper” armed with a rifle. The first victim was shot through the lung while making a call at a phone booth. Over the course of a year of public panic, six women were wounded, including a 10-year old girl, one killed, and several others reported near misses. In April 1952, police arrested Evan Charles Thomas, a railroad switchman and father of two, who admitted to carrying a rifle in his car and shooting at women to fulfill an abnormal sexual urge. He readily confessed to the crimes, stating he was glad to be arrested. Thomas was only tried for the murder of Nina Marie Brice, whom he’d shot and killed at a hamburger stand. He was found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed in San Quentin’s gas chamber in 1954.

In 1954, beginning in October, women in a Miami neighborhood were attacked and robbed by a “Phantom Rapist.” The perpetrator entered some victims’ houses between 2 and 3 A.M by slitting a window screen or breaking a locked door. Victims said they woke with a towel or pillow over their faces and a knife at their throats. Some women were also ambushed walking home from the bus stop. Following the identification of William Henry, Jr. By a witness, a manhunt ensued that spread as far as Georgia and Alabama. Henry was eventually caught and arrested by Sheriff’s Office deputies. He pled guilty to breaking and entering to commit grand larceny, but not to the attempted rapes. Likely because victims were disinclined to testify in court, those charges were dropped). He was found guilty of two counts of B&E.

Returning to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, this time in 1980, we find city officials puzzled by “Phantom Wreckers”—an unauthorized, illegal demolition crew razing condemned, unoccupied houses in broad daylight and taking off with loads of valuable resalable bricks and other materials. The Phantom Wreckers began in the North Side area in March, leaving nothing of the targeted house behind except a rusty metal staircase. By July, they’d stolen another house entirely and removed the brick facing from 5 others. At one address, the Phantom Wreckers were spotted by neighbors, who called the police. The men were arrested, but after receiving a call from a “Mrs. Brown,” who lied and claimed they were authorized to tear down the residence, they were released. While a suit was later filed by the city against a construction company, because the police had no records of the men they’d arrested nor a phone number for the (fictional) Mrs. Brown, the case was dropped.

Young couples in Texarkana, Texas, feared for their lives in 1946 as a murderer dubbed “The Phantom” went on a killing spree. The first murders occurred in March—a man and a woman, each shot in the head, found in the backseat of a parked automobile. Another dead couple was discovered in April. The third couple was attacked in their home. In that instance, the husband was killed, his wife seriously injured. Here, the Phantom left his first clue: footprints in the mud. By May, the town’s teenagers were setting themselves up as bait to try and catch the killer, while citizen vigilante groups patrolled the streets. The murders remain unsolved and the Phantom was never identified or caught. The “Moonlight Murders” formed the basis of the film, The Town That Dreaded Sundown (trailer can be seen above).

Beginning in November, 1976, the Shinjuku ward—the entertainment district filled with shops, clubs, restaurants, and bars—was terrorized by a “Phantom Arsonist” who set a fire in the early morning hours every Tuesday (hence his other nickname in the media, the “Tuesday Devil Arsonist”). Each blaze was started in a garbage can and spread to nearby buildings. Fortunately, no one was injured. Worried residents, well aware of Tokyo’s long history of devastating fires, formed vigilante groups and volunteer motorcycle firefighting patrols. People began keeping flammable trash off the streets. By January 1977, the Phantom Arsonist had set 32 fires without being spotted by a single eyewitness. In February, police arrested a suspect, Shigeru Nagazawa, after he was seen setting a fire in a mailbox. He confessed to the crimes, saying he got a thrill from setting fires.

In the years between 1934-1939, more than 60 homes of rich and famous film stars in fashionable Bel-Air—a Los Angeles community—received midnight visitations from the “Phantom Burglar of Bel-Air” who stole jewelry, furs, bonds, silver, and collectibles worth millions. Despite extensive investigation, police weren’t able to identify the skilled second-story man until the arrest of William Borton AKA Ralph Graham in San Francisco in March 1939. Borton had been caught by plainclothes detectives while trying to fence $80,000 in stolen jewels. Following his arrest, Borton confessed to being the Phantom Burglar. More loot was found inside his home, although not all the stolen property was recovered. After pleading guilty, Borton was sentenced to life in San Quentin due to his record as a habitual criminal—he had served terms in 3 other states. He died in 1949 in a prison fight.

For a week in November 1938, women in the town of Halifax, England were attacked by an unknown “Phantom Slasher” who snuck up on victims at night while they walked on the street, grabbed them, slashed them with a “gleaming instrument,” and vanished into the darkness. The first victim, Mary Sutcliffe, suffered a second later attack. In all, 13 women were wounded, though non fatally. The Phantom Slasher was described as having a flat nose “like a boxer” and blackened teeth. In response, churches, shops, and movie theaters closed at dusk. Scotland Yard detectives organized a volunteer citizen’s watch with 5,000 members armed with sticks, Indian clubs, and pokers to perform night patrols. Panic and hysteria spread to 4 other towns. By December, 5 victims’ reports were proven false. And in January 1939, 3 young women were convicted of malicious mischief and given a 4 week sentence when they cut themselves and made a false police report blaming the Phantom Slasher. The item is included on this list because not all the victims’ withdrew their testimony, and a chance exists the elusive Halifax Phantom Slasher may not have been just a figment of the imagination.

During the American Civil War, US Navy ships blockaded shipping lanes to prevent supplies from reaching Confederate states. Blockade runners, whether for patriotism or profit, snuck past or outran the opposing vessels to bring their goods to market. One such blockade runner’s ship was called the “Phantom,” commanded by William Porter, brother of US Navy Admiral David Porter. The daredevil William Porter was well known for his recklessness and nerve. In 1864, Phantom was spotted off North Carolina. A federal steamer, Connecticut, set out in pursuit. Both ships battled heavy seas as the chase continued for miles down the coast. Five more US Navy ships joined the pursuit and blocked Phantom’s progress. Faced with overwhelming odds, Porter ran Phantom onto the beach, where he and his crew set her on fire before escaping. After the war, Porter returned to the merchant service.

This time, we’re in Bel Air, Maryland. Beginning in July 1986 and continuing in waves until 1990, the “Phantom Fondler” broke into homes between 3-5 A.M. He stole nothing, nor was he violent. Instead, he watched a female victim while she slept in her bed, and touched her leg, feet, abdomen, and sometimes breast. When the woman woke up understandably alarmed by the stranger in her bedroom, he made his escape. The Phantom Fondler left fingerprints, but no other clues. Police investigations turned up nothing. Periods of frequent break-ins and fondling incidents followed by months of silence led investigators to suspect the suspect might be jailed for non-related crimes during those times. At last, police found a fingerprint match: Walter Porter, an area resident recently arrested for breaking and entering. When confronted, Porter confessed to being the Phantom Fondler.

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Investigators spent years trying to find the “Grim Sleeper” – so called because he apparently took a break from killing between 1988 and 2002. His arrest came by chance, when his son was arrested and police took a DNA swab from him. By using a technique called familial DNA search, a match was obtained to the unsolved serial killings and Lonnie Franklin Jr. was arrested. Indicted of ten murders in South Los Angeles over a span of 20 years, Lonnie Franklin Jr. is also being investigated in the murders of a further 8 women by the LAPD. The known victims were all strangled, shot or both after sexual contact occurred.

Mark Dizon is accused of killing nine people (all of whom he knew personally) during three separate robberies. After the murders, he would steal the victim’s electronic equipment and pawn it. Investigators in the case have called him “obsessed” with these electronic gadgets as he would leave all the victim’s other valuables when robbing them. The local police chief has speculated that he may have wanted to obtain banking details or other financial information to get access to the victim’s pensions. In a weird and unexpected twist, he was arrested after a witness positively identified him from his facebook account’s profile photo.

Also known as the “Cleveland Strangler”, Anthony Sowell’s murderous reign came to a close when he strangled and raped a woman as she was passing out. When the woman came to, she fled his house and returned with the police and an arrest warrant. Sowell wasn’t there but the remains of 11 butchered women were. There were two bodies in the living room, four more throughout the rest of the house, four were buried in the back yard and a skull was the only remains left behind of the final victim. Investigators believe that he murdered more women than the 11 he was charged for, as he lived at the same address for more than 5 years and numerous disappearances occurred during that time.

Samuel Little is a career-criminal. His 100 page rap-sheet is so extensive, that it has provided investigators with an extremely accurate account of his exact whereabouts for the past 56 years. Last year, his DNA was positively matched to three cold case files. Throughout the US, it has been discovered that a massive amount of cold cases matches his M.O. and the dates he were present in specific towns. All of these cold cases have been re-opened and the DNA results are pending. Detectives believe that Little, a former boxer, would punch out the women, strangle them, masturbate over their bodies and leave town.

Mohan Kumar is a former teacher who confessed to killing twenty young women over a span of five years. He befriended his victims, dated them for a few weeks and then persuaded them to elope with him to neighboring towns. After spending a night together, he would ask the unsuspecting victims to drink two cyanide capsules, claiming they were “morning-after” pills. He even went so far as to tell them they would become very sick after swallowing the pills, and that it would be best if they took it in ladies rooms near the bus stands. All his victims died within moments of taking the pills freeing him up to rob them of their jewelry and other valuables.

In 2011, a 29 year old Indonesian woman was arrested after she was found to have murdered (and eaten) more than 30 young women. During her arrest, a massive amount of human remains were found in her refrigerator, including those of her husband. The unnamed cannibal reputedly also hosted various parties where she would serve up some of the human meat to her unsuspecting guests. The woman confessed that an inner yearning and unstoppable desire caused her to eat the victims, and that she would do it all again without hesitation. In Indonesia and specifically in Papa New Guinea, cannibalism was practiced well into the 20th century.

Israel Keyes loved the immense thrill that accompanied a kill. As he studied the other famous serial killers, he devised his own techniques and methods so that nobody would be able to say he copied their ideas. He stashed murder kits (containing shovels, plastic bags, money and Drano) all over the US to simplify the disposal of the bodies. Arrested for the murder of Samantha Koenig, he admitted to seven other murders. During his interviews with the FBI a pattern of abductions, rapes, murders and dismemberment became very clear. On 2 December 2012, he committed suicide in his jail cell. The FBI is convinced that there were more victims and recently requested assistance from the public regarding his travels and other activities.

“I want to clear the intensive care unit. It’s making me itch”

Those are the words of the female doctor suspected of being responsible for the deaths of up to 300 of her patients obtained via wiretap recordings. She has been officially charged with seven murders but investigations are ongoing. The prosecutors in this case believe that the doctor injected muscle-relaxants to her patients before cutting their oxygen supply. Her apparent motive was to free up the beds in the hospital. If Dr. de Souza did indeed murder up to 300 patients, it would make her more prolific than Dr. Harold Shipman, who racked up a body count of 250.

Between 2008 and 2012, scores of children disappeared in the Yunnan province of southwest China. The police’s investigations led them to Zhang’s home where they discovered strips of dried and cured human flesh, preserved eyeballs and various other human remains. The Chinese cannibal not only consumed the children’s flesh, he also fed the meat to his dogs and sold the cured remains as ostrich meat at the village market of Kunming. More than 20 people living within a two-mile radius of Zhang were reported missing, but police could only tie him to 11 victims. Zhang was executed in January 2013.

The prolific Russian serial killer and ex-policeman from Vladivostok is suspected to be one of the worst serial killers in the history of Russia. He has murdered at least 24 women with another 26 possible victims in a neighboring province. Picking up women late at night under the pretense of giving them a ride home, he would take them to forests where he proceeded to torture them with screwdrivers and knives, often times beheading them and raping their corpses. Unable to get a suspect from the DNA left at the scenes for years, Mikhail P was finally arrested when the investigators decided to test it against the DNA of former policemen.

Hestie is a graphic designer, author and entrepreneur living in Pretoria, South Africa. She has a semi-unhealthy obsession with vampires, serial killers, history and of course, Listverse.

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Here are ten parents who crossed that line, and committed an act of filicide. In many of these cases, the perpetrator is clearly guilty. Others are still mixed up in controversy about what really happened. But worst of all, some of these perpetrators have never been caught for their crimes, and may still be out there somewhere.

One of the most notorious acts of familicide was committed by John List, a seemingly ordinary accountant from Westfield, New Jersey. On November 9, 1971, List shot his wife and mother at the family’s home, and then shot two of his children, Patricia and Frederick, after they returned from school. Chillingly, List then went to watch his son, John Jr., playing in a soccer game at school, before driving him home and shooting him too. List planned these murders so meticulously that it was over a month before the bodies were discovered. By that time, he was long gone.

List was unemployed and experiencing financial difficulties at the time of the murders, and his family didn’t even know he had lost his job. In his own twisted mind, List believed it was better to send his family to heaven rather than give them a share in his hardships, so he killed them and disappeared to start a new life.

List remained one of the world’s most notorious fugitives until he was profiled on America’s Most Wanted in 1989. The show featured a remarkably accurate age-progressed clay bust of List, and viewer tips led authorities to discover that he was living in Richmond, Virginia, under the name “Robert Clark.” He was arrested and sentenced to five consecutive life terms for the murders, and died in prison in 2008.

On March 2, 1976, a brush fire was discovered in a wooded area in Columbia, North Carolina, which concealed a shallow grave containing the burned remains of five bodies. They remained unidentified until eight days later, when police visited the residence of William Bradford Bishop in Bethesda, Maryland, and discovered a bloody crime scene. The bodies were soon identified as Bishop’s wife, mother, and three sons. On March 18, Bishop’s car was found abandoned at Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee, but Bishop himself was nowhere to be found.

Bishop was an employee of the State Department, and decided to leave work early on March 1 after discovering that he had been passed over for a promotion. It is theorized that this event might have caused him to snap, as Bishop would purchase a ball-peen hammer, a shovel, and a gas can before returning home that night to bludgeon his family to death. He drove 275 miles to dispose of their bodies before driving to Tennessee to abandon his vehicle. Because of his experience in the Foreign Service, it was believed that Bishop fled to Europe.

Nearly three years after the murders, a former co-worker spotted a transient resembling Bishop in a washroom in Sorrento, Italy. This man proceeded to panic and run away. There have been numerous sightings of him in Europe over the years, but William Bradford Bishop still remains a wanted fugitive.

In 1999, Andrea Yates was living in Houston, Texas, with her husband and four children, when she suffered a complete nervous breakdown. Over the course of the summer, she would make numerous suicide attempts which led to psychiatric hospitalizations. Yates was eventually diagnosed as having postpartum psychosis—but even though she was advised not to have any more children, she gave birth to a fifth child in November 2000. On June 20, 2001, Andrea Yates snapped, and drowned all five of her children in a bathtub.

Yates was indicted for capital murder, and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. In March 2002, a jury rejected this defense and sentenced her to life imprisonment. In 2005, this conviction was reversed on the grounds that one of the prosecution’s witnesses had testified that Yates got the idea to drown her children and plead insanity from an episode of Law & Order, but it was discovered that no such episode existed. One year later, Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and committed to a mental hospital. She remains incarcerated, but to this day it is heavily debated whether she was truly insane—unfairly pushed to breaking point by her husband’s insistence on having a fifth child—or whether she was an evil woman who knew exactly what she was doing.

In the early morning hours of February 17, 1970, military police arrived at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina, residence of Green Beret physician, Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald. MacDonald had a stab wound and numerous cuts and bruises, but his wife, Collette, and two young daughters, Kimberley and Kristen, were found brutally stabbed to death. MacDonald’s story was that a group of drug-crazed Charles Manson-esque hippies had broken into his home and committed the murders. There were suspicions about MacDonald’s account of the crime, but an Army Article 32 hearing cleared him of any wrongdoing, and he would later move to California.

MacDonald’s father-in-law, Freddie Kassab, eventually became convinced that MacDonald had staged the crime scene—and he launched his own investigation. Evidence was uncovered which eventually led to MacDonald being charged with the murders, and sentenced to life imprisonment. This remains one of the most controversial murder cases of all time, as MacDonald’s guilt is still hotly debated to this day.

There have been allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, poor crime scene investigation, and confessions from a currently deceased suspect named Helena Stoeckley that she and her friends were the ones who committed the murders. But the physical evidence from the scene still seems to point to MacDonald’s guilt, so in spite of numerous appeals to the court, he remains incarcerated.

In the early morning hours of June 6, 1996, a Rowlett, Texas, woman named Darlie Routier frantically called 911. She claimed that while she was sleeping downstairs with her two sons, Damon and Devon, she awoke to find an unknown male intruder attacking her. After chasing the intruder out of the house, Darlie then discovered that she had been stabbed and that Damon and Devon had been brutally murdered. Her husband and youngest son were sleeping upstairs, and missed the attack. But the authorities did not believe Routier’s story, and they charged her with the murders four days later.

It is believed that after murdering her sons, Routier inflicted her own stab wounds upon herself and staged the crime scene. It seemed unlikely that she could have remained asleep while this so-called intruder was killing her children—and since there was no blood trail leading away from the scene, the physical evidence did not match Roulier’s story.

It was theorized that since the family was experiencing financial difficulties, Darlie killed her sons to collect on a life insurance policy. When she went to trial, she was sentenced to death via lethal injection. Like the Jeffrey MacDonald case, this remains highly controversial; supporters of Routier’s innocence have pointed to numerous errors in the investigation, and think that certain pieces of evidence support her story. But Routier still remains on death row, seventeen years later.

On December 7, 2009, Susan Powell—a twenty-eight-year-old woman from West Valley, Utah—mysteriously disappeared. Because she had been having trouble with her marriage, Susan’s husband, Josh Powell, soon became a suspect. Josh claimed that he returned home to find his wife missing after taking their young sons, Braden and Charlie, on a camping trip. This story did not make much sense, however, since temperatures were below freezing at that time. As suspicion began to mount against Josh, he eventually lost custody of his children to Susan’s parents, and was only allowed supervised visitation.

On February 5, 2012, a social worker was taking Braden and Charlie to Josh’s home for a visit when Josh pulled his children inside and locked her out. He then proceeded to attack his sons with a hatchet before blowing up his house in a premeditated murder-suicide. It is speculated that authorities were close to finding incriminating evidence to tie Josh to Susan’s disappearance, which is why he decided to murder his children and take his own life. Sadly, Josh did not leave behind any information about what happened to his wife. Susan’s body has still not been found, and she officially remains a missing person.

On the night of May 19, 1983, a woman named Diane Downs pulled into a hospital in Springfield, Oregon. Her three children, Danny, Cheryl, and Christie, were in the back of the car and had all been shot—and she herself had a gunshot wound in her left forearm. Downs claimed that an unknown assailant had attempted to carjack her on a rural road, and had shot at her and her children. Cheryl was immediately pronounced dead, but the other two children survived the attack. Danny was paralyzed while Christie suffered a disabling stroke. Investigators were immediately suspicious about Diane’s story, since she acted surprisingly calm about the situation, and Christie appeared terrified whenever her mother was in her presence.

The evidence in the car did not match Diane’s story—and as soon as Christie recovered well enough to speak again, she was able to testify that her own mother had carried out the shooting. Investigators discovered that Downs had been conducting an affair with a married man named Robert Knickerbocker. Since he did not want children in his life, it is believed that Downs decided to kill her kids so she could continue the affair. Downs was found guilty of the crime, and sentenced to life imprisonment plus fifty years. Her surviving children were eventually adopted by Fred Hugi, the prosecutor on her case.

For more than ten years, Robert Fisher has occupied a spot on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Fisher was living in Scottsdale, Arizona, with his wife, Mary, and his two children, Brittney and Bobby Jr., when authorities responded to a powerful explosion at their home on April 10, 2001. They found the remains of Mary, Brittney, and Bobby Jr., but Robert and the family’s SUV were nowhere to be found. It was soon discovered that Mary had been shot, and that all three of the victims had their throats slit prior to the explosion.

Investigators would uncover that Robert Fisher was a controlling husband and father, and therefore in danger of being divorced by his wife. It is thought that because Fisher was so emotionally affected by the divorce of his own parents, he did not want his children to experience the same thing. It’s likely that after murdering his family, Fisher doused them with gasoline before cutting the house’s natural gas line to ignite an explosion and cover up all traces of homicide. Ten days after the murders, the Fishers’ SUV was found at Tonto National Forest. People have wondered whether Fisher may have committed suicide somewhere, or whether he is living under an assumed identity—but until any trace of him is found, he remains a wanted fugitive.

On October 25, 1994, a Union, South Carolina, woman named Susan Smith frantically contacted the police to report that she had been carjacked by an unidentified black male. She claimed that this man drove her vehicle away with her two sons, three-year-old Michael and fourteen-month-old Alex, still inside. Police conducted a massive search for the vehicle, and this set off a media frenzy as Smith went on television to plead for the return of her children.

But the authorities soon began to feel that there were inconsistencies in Smith’s story, and they became particularly suspicious after a polygraph test showed signs of deception. Nine days later, after some intense interrogation, Smith finally confessed that her story was false and that this carjacker did not exist.

Smith’s vehicle was soon found in John D. Long Lake with her deceased children inside. She had deliberately rolled the car into the lake to drown them. Like Diane Downs, Smith had been conducting an affair with a man who had no interest in children, so she believed that getting rid of her own kids could rekindle their relationship. During her trial, Smith’s defense team claimed that her actions were the result of mental health issues—but the jury still sentenced her to life imprisonment for the murder of her sons. She will not be eligible for parole until 2024.

The most infamous case of familicide in Australia’s history took place in Port Campbell on July 2, 1970, when a crashed car was discovered on a rocky ledge near the bottom of a cliff at Loch Ard Gorge. In the driver’s seat was a deceased pregnant woman named Therese Crawford; the bodies of her three children—Kathryn, James, and Karen—were found under a tarpaulin in the back. Their father, Elmer Crawford, was nowhere to be found—so authorities instantly suspected that he had pushed the car over the cliff.

It was later determined that Crawford had constructed an electrocution device and attached alligator clips to his wife’s ears to electrocute her as she slept. He then proceeded to bludgeon his children to death. Two weeks before the murders, new wills had been drafted which would leave Crawford a fortune if his family died.

It’s thought that because the family’s car hit the rocky ledge and did not become submerged in the water, Crawford’s plan backfired, and he was forced to flee. In 2005, an elderly man was found dead in Texas with several phony IDs in his possession. His striking resemblance to Crawford led to speculation that it might be him, but DNA tests have since ruled this out—so Elmer Crawford’s whereabouts remain a mystery.

Robin Warder is a budding Canadian screenwriter who has used his encyclopedic movie knowledge to publish numerous articles at Cracked.com. He is also the co-owner of a pop culture called The Back Row.

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We like to think that these murderers will eventually be hunted down and caught—but of course, this is not always the case. Some serial murderers elude capture for years, even decades—and some are never caught. Any one of the ten people below may still be roaming the streets today:

On February 9, in a suburb of Salt Lake City, an Hispanic woman was attacked and murdered while alone in her apartment. Incredibly, the same thing happened twice, in both 2006 and 2008. And though at first the repeated circumstances were taken to be a grisly coincidence, DNA analysis of evidence collected at both scenes would later prove that the murders were committed by the same man, whom the media promptly dubbed the “February 9 Killer.”

In the 2006 case, the victim Sonia Mejia was pregnant when she was assaulted and strangled. A few items were stolen from her apartment, but none of them ever turned up. In the 2008 case, Damiana Castillo was strangled in her apartment about a mile away from Mejia’s place. In both cases, there was no sign of forced entry- and while the investigative agencies involved were and still are extremely reluctant to label the perpetrator a “serial killer,” that certainly seems to be an apt description of a man who kills two women in a very similar fashion, on the same date, two years apart.

While police have a vague description of the killer, they’re not saying how they arrived at it; and while they have a DNA profile, they don’t have a match for that profile—meaning that unless the perpetrator is eventually made to surrender a DNA sample for some unrelated crime, he may never be caught.

The twin cities of Texarkana, Texas, and Texarkana, Arkansas, have only had one reported case of serial murder, and it was a case that gripped the region in fear for several months in 1946. The attacks came at night on the weekends, roughly every few weekends for that period; in total, five people were killed and three more injured. The case so captured the public imagination that thirty years later, it inspired the horror film The Town That Dreaded Sundown.

Only the first victims, Mary Jeanne Larey and Jimmy Hollis, were able to give a description of their attacker—and it was more terrifying than it was helpful. They described a six-foot-tall man with a plain white sack over his head, which had holes cut out for the eyes and mouth. It isn’t known whether or not the killer wore this mask during the other attacks; the only other survivor didn’t get a look. The killer used a .32 caliber pistol, nearly always killed three weeks apart, and always carried out his murders in the dead of night.

After one of the murders, Sheriff William Presley exclaimed to the press, “This killer is the luckiest person I have ever known. No one sees him, hears him in time, or can identify him in any way.” This led the press to dub him the Phantom Killer, and the killings themselves have become known as the Texarkana Moonlight Murders. One suspect, Youell Swinney, was imprisoned as a repeat car theft offender in 1947 and released in 1973; he was never charged with the crimes. Though some in law enforcement and the press have speculated that the murders may have been the early work of the Zodiac Killer, this has never been proven in any way.

In the 1970s, being gay in America was a very tricky and sometimes very scary thing. Even in relatively accepting communities, prejudice could rear its ugly head at any moment—and one predator of young gay men of the era seemed to understand this with terrifying clarity.

The “Doodler” or “Black Doodler,” as he was variously nicknamed by the press, was so-called because he carried out his murders thus: he would gain entrance to his victims’ abodes as a companion, then sketch them, before stabbing them to death. How creepy is that?

Between January 1974 and February 1975, no less than fourteen young gay men were killed. Three more were attacked, but survived—yet the case remains unsolved, because the survivors refused to out themselves by testifying against the prime suspect. Despite the fact that these killings occurred in San Francisco, which was one of the most accepting areas of the US that existed at the time, these victims were more afraid of the ramifications of coming out than they were of the man who tried to murder them.

Two of these survivors were public figures—an entertainer and a US diplomat. Harvey Milk, Mayor of San Francisco at the time and a gay man himself, stated, “I can understand their position. I respect the pressure society has put on them . . . my feeling is that they don’t want to be exposed.” Shamefully, the police never named or arrested a suspect, and the case has long since gone cold.

In February 2009, a dog walker discovered a human bone on what’s known as the West Mesa of Albuquerque, New Mexico. This discovery resulted in the largest crime scene, area-wise, in US history—the dumping grounds of an unidentified killer, known to locals as the “Bone Collector.”

The remains of eleven women, all prostitutes, were eventually excavated from the area; in the years since, not a single shred of promising evidence has been unearthed. No DNA; no potential murder weapons; no possible character descriptions—nothing has been found. Sex workers in the area still live in fear of the killer, even though no murders associated with him have been reported for years; some unscrupulous clients even gain the compliance of prostitutes by suggesting that they might be the killer. “He is their bogeyman,” said the founder of Safe Sex Work, a local non-profit.

Local police have stopped shrugging off reports of rapes and beatings of sex workers in the area, and a “Bad Date List”—a registry of local men who have mistreated prostitutes—is now regularly updated. Local sex workers have become exceedingly cautious, and while this may have played a part in foiling the killer’s activities, his identity is still a complete mystery.

In the early 1970s, a series of brutal killings shook the area around Rochester, New York. The victims were all young girls—but that wasn’t all they had in common. Carmen Colon, Wanda Walkowicz, and Michelle Maenza also happened to have alliterative initials, leading the press to initially refer to the incidents as the “Double Initial Killings,” later revising this to the much punchier “Alphabet Murders.”

Many people were questioned in relation to these crimes, and one suspect who killed himself shortly after the final murder was for a long time thought to be the most likely culprit—that is, until he was posthumously cleared in 2007 by DNA testing.

Likewise, an uncle of one of the victims was thought to be a prime suspect; he was never charged, and was subsequently cleared when DNA testing became available. Rochester native Kenneth Bianchi has long been under suspicion, too. After moving to Los Angeles, he and his cousin committed the murders attributed to the “Hillside Strangler”—and while Bianchi has never officially been cleared of the Rochester killings, he has also never been charged, and still maintains his innocence.

Additionally, in 2011, seventy-seven-year-old New Yorker Joseph Naso was charged with murdering four women in California in the late 1970s. He probably wouldn’t have been considered in relation to the Rochester case, but for the names of his victims: Roxene Roggash, Pamela Parsons, Tracy Tofoya and—incredibly—another Carmen Colon. But at the time of writing, Naso’s trial has been repeatedly postponed in the California cases; nor has he been charged with the Rochester Alphabet Murders.

Between 1968 and 1985, a monster stalked the streets of Florence, Italy. He (or she) wielded a .22 caliber pistol, murdering sixteen people (and occasionally mutilating the genitals of female victims) before inexplicably vanishing. The killer almost always struck couples, and police have been utterly stymied in their attempts to definitively solve the case.

Over the course of the investigation, they interviewed more than one hundred thousand people; four different men have been convicted of the murders at four different times—and of course, they can’t all be guilty of all the murders. Many others have been arrested in connection with the crimes, only to be released when the killer struck again using the same gun and modus operandi.

Independent investigations have arrived at the conclusion that Antonio Vinci, a relative of two other suspects in the murders, is a likely culprit; Vinci is still alive and free, and in 2008 maintained his innocence in a “Dateline NBC” interview. Whoever the monster is—or was—a resolution seems highly unlikely nearly thirty years after the last murder occurred.

Canada’s Highway 16, running for nearly nine hundred miles through the heart of British Columbia, has some of the most incredible scenery of any highway in the world. Strange, then, that it should be known as the “Highway of Tears”—until you consider that it runs through many areas so isolated that nobody will be around to hear the screams, when bad things happen. And they have indeed happened; over the last few decades, no fewer than forty young women have disappeared while hitchhiking on the highway.

For years, many blamed Canadian police for failing to make satisfactory investigations. Many of the victims were Inuit or non-white, and some say that the investigation only began in earnest when a white victim was killed in 2002.

Officials admit that the area is incredibly difficult to police effectively: logging roads run for hundreds of miles and then reach a dead end; many stretches of the highway itself are deserted, with no towns for miles; and even mobile phone reception is patchy or nonexistent for long stretches.

Of course, there’s a strong possibility that the disappearances are the work of more than one killer. A few suspects convicted of murders in the US have fallen under suspicion in relation to some of the Canadian crimes, but nothing has ever been proven—and all of these suspects have been definitively ruled out in at least some of the Highway of Tears cases. As long as the highway continues to offer vast, isolated areas as hunting ground for predators, it seems likely that there will continue to be prey.

The killer known as the “Rainbow Maniac” has for years been targeting gay men in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil—home to one of the most vibrant gay communities in South America. The area is host to the largest annual gay pride march on the planet, and Paturis Park had become a popular “hookup” spot—until it became a stalking ground for a lunatic.

The park has been witness to the killings of thirteen men since 2007. Police believe that the same murderer may also be responsible for three more deaths in nearby Osasco; they also have a hunch that their suspect may be a current or former police officer. Indeed, local papers were reporting in 2008 that retired officer Jairo Francisco Franco had been arrested, and that police were sure they had their man. No charges or conviction were forthcoming, however, and the case remains unsolved to date.

In the late 1960s, three young Scottish women met their end at the hands of a Scripture-quoting murderer who came to be known as “Bible John.”

All of the victims were strangled with their own stockings. Additionally, they were all menstruating at the time of their—and this was evidently known to the killer, as pads or tampons were placed near the bodies of all of the victims.

Jean Puttock—sister of the victim Helen Puttock—was able to provide the only known description of the killer after sharing a taxi with him (and her doomed sister) for an hour. The man had identified himself as “John Templeton,” and had extensively quoted from the Bible, and even referred to the types of dance halls in which he met his victims as “dens of iniquity.” After Jean and her date exited the cab, Helen continued on with John—only to be found dead the next morning. The man disappeared without a trace.

One day in July, 1962, the Boston Herald screamed from its front page, “Mad Strangler Kills Four Women In Boston!” It was a case that gripped the public’s imagination—and its resolution may turn out to be no resolution at all.

Between 1962 and 1964, thirteen women ranging in age from nineteen to eighty-five were murdered in the Boston area. All were strangled with silk stockings; nearly all were sexually assaulted; and there was never any sign of forced entry into their homes. In October 1964, a man who had been arrested for raping a woman in her own house—Albert DeSalvo—confessed in detail to the killings, and was convicted.

DeSalvo was able to describe details of the crime scenes which had not been made public, but inexplicably, he also got many of these details wrong. At the time of his confession, he was an inmate in a mental institution, and was subsequently sentenced to life in prison. But the inconsistencies of his confession—inaccurate times of death, method of strangulation, and so on—were never addressed. More alarmingly, police had always been of the opinion that the murders were likely the work of more than one person—and indeed, DNA evidence has exonerated DeSalvo of one of the killings to which he had confessed.

John E. Douglas, an FBI agent who worked on the case and one of the first-ever criminal profilers, has stated that—based on DeSalvo’s profile—he is unlikely to have committed the murders, but very likely to have wanted to claim credit for them. Which means that even though the murders are more than forty years old, the possibility exists that one of the most notorious serial killers in history is still out there.

Mike Floorwalker blogs, Tweets, writes, edits and occasionally sleeps.

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We may all be guilty, at one time or another, of accusing our significant others of being a pain in the neck. Well, one Utah man was convinced that his girlfriend was a pain in the head. A literal pain in the head; he believed she was causing his crippling headache, and that the only way to get rid of it was to shoot her.

So he did. Neighbors heard the gunshot and called police, who arrived to find the man hiding in a ditch, still clutching his 9 mm handgun. He readily admitted shooting his companion; according to court documents, “He stated that his head began to hurt, whereupon he believed that the only way to ease the pain in his head was to shoot (her) . . . (he) believed that by shooting (her) she would die, and the pain in his head would cease.”

The woman was hospitalized in critical condition, but survived. The man is awaiting trial at the time of writing, and is hopefully still suffering from the headache.

When Port Townsend, Washington, resident Michael Fenter was arrested for bank robbery in 2009, police could be forgiven for thinking they might have the wrong guy—even though he had been caught red-handed and was carrying an explosive device. Fenter had never been convicted of so much as a misdemeanor in his life.

A married father of three, he ran a farm with his wife; the family had even been recently profiled in a local paper. They were financially stable, and Michael was not a drug user, gambler, or involved in any illegal activities. Except, that is, for robbing banks. He had robbed four of them in recent months, and after his arrest, authorities couldn’t account for any of the money he’d stolen.

The only clue to a motive came when Michael identified himself as “Patrick Henry,” a famous revolutionary, upon his arrest. Interviews with bank employees yielded the fact that he had griped about government bailouts during the robberies; and he eventually explained that he had done it because he was a so-called patriot. “What I am for is real justice, real truth, and real accountability within our system of government,” he was quoted as saying in a local paper. “The money was used and is probably currently being used to get to the truth.”

What truth that is was never made clear, but Michael Fenter’s truth now involves a ten-year Federal prison sentence. Fenter insists that the money is being used in a “peaceful” way; but considering that this is a man who threatened innocent bank employees with real explosives, authorities are probably not too comforted.

Ashley Hunter and Orlando DeWitt were prison buddies who brought a girl home from a bar for some fun one night. Fortunately, this did not end as tragically as that sentence may lead you to believe.

It seems that (and we will tread delicately here) Orlando began getting intimate with the woman on a couch in the living room, and Ashley decided he wanted in. Everything was going hunky-dory, when Ashley presumably rang a bell and shouted “switch!”

Orlando apparently refused, and it was at this point that Ashley produced a huge butcher knife from inside the couch—which as far as we can tell is not a normal place to keep a butcher knife.

All hell broke loose: Hunter ended up stabbing DeWitt in the arm, and was arrested for assault. The police report goes into (probably totally unnecessary) detail, but then “stabbing over dispute during threesome” is likely not something they get the chance to write up every day.

Prison psychologist Laurie Martinez had a harrowing story for police when they arrived following her 911 call in April, 2011. She had come home to find a “male black adult” in her home, who punched her unconscious and raped her while she was passed out defenseless. He robbed her home of some electronics and disappeared into the night—and it quickly became apparent that this was all a bunch of baloney.

In reality, the “stolen” belongings were at the home of her friend Nicole Snyder, whom Laurie had enlisted to help pull off this scam. She had split her own lip with a safety pin, had asked Nicole to punch her in the face a few times, sandpapered her own knuckles to make it look like there had been a scuffle, and—we’re not joking—intentionally peed herself.

Perhaps it was the incredibly tired “a black guy did it” shtick that caused her story to unravel. Regardless, it turns out that it was all a plot to convince her husband that their neighborhood was unsafe, because she wanted to move to a nicer one.

Unfortunately for Laurie, her husband didn’t appreciate the gesture, and filed for divorce. Laurie got five years probation; she lost her job, her license to practice psychology, and the custody of her kids.

In March 2013, police responded to an incident involving a sixty-one-year-old woman who had tried to use a dollar-off coupon at the local Walmart. This may not sound too threatening—but then, most elderly Walmart patrons don’t start waving guns around when their coupons are rejected.

Mary Alday was told by a clerk that this particular store didn’t accept coupons that were printed online, and the assistant manager didn’t have much luck when she tried to explain the policy. Alday called her a five-letter word rhyming with witch, and hit her with a shopping cart. When the manager followed her out of the store, Alday produced the .38 from her car, threatening the manager and several employees with “I have something for y’all!”

Fortunately, no shots were fired; Alday was pulled over a short time later by sheriff’s deputies. She admitted to having a gun, refused to yield this gun, reached for something and promptly got tasered. Four counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon later, Walmart still hasn’t refunded her the dollar.

In another case of Walmart stores apparently inducing psychosis in certain people, a Walmart manager in Anchorage, Alaska, received an unexpected response to his request that a disabled patron leash up his service dog.

Daniel Pirtle rode into the store on a motorized cart, his dog trotting alongside, and store manager Jason Mahi received him with the common (and totally understandable) request to please put it on a leash. Pirtle produced a gun and shot Mahi in the stomach. Amazingly, there does not seem to be much that happened in the period of time between these two incidents.

An off-duty police officer detained Pirtle while an Army combat medic who happened to be in the store rendered aid. Mahi survived; Pirtle was charged with first-degree assault and weapons misconduct and is awaiting trial at the time of writing. He has stated his intention to defend himself—and we wish him the best of luck with that.

Bryan Paul Smith, a resident of Leavenworth, Kansas, had a few surprises up his sleeve when he was contacted by police in July 2012. Nothing that could help him in any way, we should add; merely useless surprises, like the fourteen-year old kid hiding in his closet.

While it’s unclear which crime Smith was initially contacted for, it is known that he acted as a lookout for another man during a series of car burglaries. His strangest crime, however, was holding a spider hostage. Apparently, an acquaintance had given Smith the spider to take care of (we don’t know what sort of care spiders require—and we’re not asking). But when Smith was asked to return it, he countered with a different offer: give me a hundred dollars, or the spider gets it.

During the investigation it was revealed that he may have also threatened to shoot the spider-owner at some point, that he was in possession of a stolen Siberian Husky, that he was involved in the burglaries, and—oh yeah—that there was a kid for some reason hiding in his closet. Smith was sentenced to about five years in prison for these crimes of varying degrees of oddness.

When Anthony Miller robbed an Ephrata, Pennsylvania, bank in 2007, tellers noticed something a little odd about him. He displayed a gun, but didn’t threaten anybody—and he didn’t seem very nervous. He kept asking them if they’d called the police yet, and after they’d given him the money he still loitered about for several minutes.

Similarly, when the police arrived, he didn’t seem surprised and didn’t put up a fight. He went along quietly, and in fact told them that he had wanted to be caught. He would gladly go to jail if it meant that he could get away from his wife.

When brought before a judge, Miller explained that she was very controlling, threatened suicide if he were to leave, and was often abusive—and the poor guy figured that jail was his only way out. Despite using an unloaded BB gun for the bank robbery, he was sentenced to three to six years in prison. But there was a silver lining: his wife filed for divorce. Miller’s attorney told the local paper that he had met the wife when she had come to pick up the car after Miller’s arrest.

After about twenty minutes in her presence, said the attorney, “I was ready for jail, too.”

In addition to having a serious aversion to last names, Kent Craig is a man who expects you to return his stuff when you borrow it. If you do not, then you will be made to pay. Oh, Kent won’t do anything about it personally—such as ask for the stuff back, for example—but if you keep him waiting long enough, he just might take out a hit on you.

Craig Corle had the misfortune of sharing Kent’s other first name, and also of having borrowed some stereo speakers from him. A friend of Kent’s, Cesar Guzman, was also owed a hundred bucks by Corle, so they hatched a plan: call him up and ask him politely to make good on his debts. Actually, scratch that—they instead hired a random thug to beat him up for fifty bucks.

At least, that’s what Cesar thought was the plan. Supposedly unbeknownst to him, Kent gave their thug-for-hire the green light to kill Corle instead, which he did. Corle was shot ten times and his computer was stolen; the thug was arrested, and Guzman and Kent Craig quickly followed. Guzman served six years for voluntary manslaughter for his part, and has been released; Craig got twenty-six years to life in prison—which wouldn’t seem worth it, even if the speakers had been made of diamonds.

In March 2008, thirty-nine-year-old Robert Lyons savagely attacked and killed his mother in their condominium, by bludgeoning her with a cognac bottle and stabbing her. At his trial, prosecutors said that he snapped; the two were prone to profane arguments on a fairly regular basis, and Robert had a lot of anger against his mother. But what had finally pushed him past his limit?

It turns out that it was his mother’s failure to call a friend who had Skybox-seating tickets to an upcoming concert Robert wanted to see.

We’ve all been disappointed when we couldn’t see a much-anticipated show, but we can’t imagine a more severe overreaction than this. What dark forces swirled inside this man? Who did he want to see so badly that his mother’s failure to procure tickets could have driven him to a murderous, bloody rage? Slayer, perhaps? Cannibal Corpse? Napalm Death?

Nope. He had wanted to see Avril Lavigne. And although it would be more plausible that a middle-aged man would kill his own mother to avoid an Avril Lavigne concert, we stand by our sources.

The post 10 Serious Crimes Committed for Bizarre Reasons appeared first on Listverse.

When you look into it, you soon find that there have been hundreds of cases of death row inmates who, it was later discovered, were actually innocent. In fact, in the United States alone this has happened to more than one hundred different people. Unfortunately, some of these were indeed executed; featured on this list, however, are ten who managed to get exonerated before their sentence was carried out.

In 1987, someone robbed and murdered a North Carolina bootlegger named Leamon Grady, in a case we find particularly shocking because we had no idea that bootlegging still existed. Levon Jones was later convicted of the crime, and spent more than a decade on North Carolina’s death row before finally being removed in 2006 and released from prison altogether in 2007. So why did Jones get convicted in the first place? Well, all evidence points to a jilted lover.

Lovely Lorden, a former lover of Jones, had been the star witness: she testified at the original trial that Jones had indeed been the murderer. But she later admitted that she had lied under oath, and had in fact collected $4,000 in reward money for providing clues towards the arrest and conviction. Lorden lacked credibility to the point that a judge went so far as to chastise the defense attorneys who had originally worked on the Jones case, and removed the accused from death row while everything was sorted out. In 2007, the prosecution realized that they simply had no evidence and gave up trying to keep Jones on death row.

Glen Chapman was sentenced to death in 1994, and spent fifteen years on death row before finally being released. Chapman had been convicted of the murders of Betty Jean Ramseur and Tenene Yvette Conley.

This was yet another case of the system being so hell-bent on getting a conviction, that the authorities decided to take matters into their own hands. Chapman was given his new trial when it was discovered that detectives had actually concealed evidence which pointed to his innocence, and that another detective had actually committed perjury while testifying at the trial. Chapman’s defense attorneys were also so bad that the North Carolina State Bar disciplined one, while the other was removed from another death penalty case to get treatment for alcohol abuse.

We are not sure if there is a more heinous crime than the kidnapping, raping, and murdering of a small child. That’s exactly the crime that Akabori Masao found himself accused of committing—and it’s the crime which, in 1954, he confessed to carrying out. Of course, the fact is that he did not do any of those things, and it turns out that he admitted to them because of police torture. This was enough to get him convicted and sentenced to death anyway, despite his retraction of the confession.

Ultimately, Masao was exonerated and finally found himself a free man again in 1989, receiving compensation of just under a million dollars from the Japanese government.

In 1985, Paul House was convicted of raping and murdering his neighbor, Carolyn Muncey—and for the next twenty-two years he lived on death row in Tennessee. Eventually he was released into house arrest after being stricken with multiple sclerosis. In addition to this, new evidence had come to light that threw his guilt into question.

Of course, even after his exoneration in 2009, prosecutors remain unconvinced that he is not guilty of the crime. But multiple DNA tests have been conducted over the years, and none of the samples found under the fingernails of the victim matched House’s DNA. This fact makes it pretty hard to fathom how he could possibly have raped Muncey, let alone killed her.

House had been set to be retried when this DNA evidence came to light, but the district attorney finally decided that there was enough reasonable doubt to keep him from being convicted. We’re assuming that he also felt that it would be kind of a jerk move to put a seemingly innocent man with MS back in prison after he’d already spent twenty-two years on death row.

In movies about people on death row, the final piece of evidence that will prove the innocence of a wrongfully convicted man always comes to light just before the executioner is about to throw the switch. But that can’t possibly happen in real life, right?

As it turns out, that’s pretty much exactly how things panned out for John Thompson in 1999. Though the evidence in question did not come to light mere minutes before his execution, it did come out only weeks before he was set to be executed in Louisiana. That’s when it was discovered that prosecutors had withheld evidence which could have cleared Thompson of all charges.

Thompson was arrested for robbery and murder in 1985, and by 1987 he found himself on one of the most infamous death rows in the world, in Angola Prison. He was given six different execution dates over the period he spent on death row, but managed to delay them with appeals until, finally, a seventh execution date was apparently set in stone. But his lawyers had hired a private investigator who somehow managed to pull off a miracle: he found a report withheld by the prosecutors which showed that Thompson’s blood type did not match that of the perpetrator found at the scene of the crime. Because the robbery had been directly tied to the murder, he was taken off of death row. After receiving a new trial in 2003, it took the jury just thirty-five minutes to acquit him of all charges.

We mentioned previously that in the US over one hundred prisoners on death row have been exonerated; Ray Krone has the unique distinction of being the hundredth. He was convicted in 1992 of murdering a waitress at a bar in Arizona. To make matters worse, the authorities decided to slap kidnapping and sexual assault charges onto his “resume” as well.

Amazingly, it took the jury only three and a half hours to convict Krone, who had earned the nickname “The Snaggletooth Killer.” But in 2001, a judge ordered a new DNA test on a piece of the victim’s clothing, and it showed that there was no evidence that Krone had been present at the scene of the crime. The DNA did match that of another man, however, who was already in the system. Krone was released in 2002 after the other man—who was already in prison for another sexual assault—admitted to the crime.

So we’ve just told you about the hundredth person released from death row in the US, and now you’re probably wondering about the ninety-ninth, right? Well, Juan Roberto Melendez-Colon was released from Florida’s death row just three months before Ray Krone—and apart from being the ninety-ninth prisoner in America to be exonerated from a death sentence, he was the twenty-ninth in the state of Florida alone.

Melendez-Colon was convicted of murder in 1983. As it turns out, he was convicted largely based on the testimony of two felons, one of whom was believed to have been coerced and threatened into implicating Melendez-Colon. There was no physical evidence tying him to the crime, yet the jury found the testimony of the two convicted criminals convincing enough, apparently, to sentence Melendez-Colon to death.

Since we’ve already told you about the ninety-ninth and the hundredth men who survived death row in the US, we may as well tell you about the first. Kirk Bloodsworth became the first man to have his death sentence overturned by DNA evidence. He was first convicted of murder in 1985, and sentenced to death. After the guilty verdict was overturned a year later, he was retried and convicted yet again, shortly afterwards. It wasn’t until 1993 that he was finally granted his freedom.

Bloodsworth had been convicted of the rape and murder of a nine year old girl, and his initial guilty verdict and death sentence were only overturned when it was discovered that prosecutors had withheld crucial evidence from the defense. After his second trial, he was actually given two sentences of life imprisonment rather than being put back on death row—so it seems that there are small victories even when you’ve been wrongfully convicted.

The real murderer was apparently described as being a large, burly man, which also makes it almost laughable when the actual perpetrator turned out to be a mere 5’6”, weighing only 160 pounds (73kg).

While most death row exonerations have taken place in more recent years—largely due to the fact that people used to be awfully gung-ho about killing convicted felons—there are a few much earlier cases of innocent men being released from their death sentences. In 1910, for instance, two men in Spain were convicted of murdering a shepherd named Jose Maria Grimaldos Lopez, and prosecuted with the aim of securing the death penalty.

Those two men were Gregorio Valero and Leon Sanchez, and the gross miscarriages of justice that led to their conviction were to become infamous in Spain. Grimaldos Lopez disappeared without a trace in 1910, and despite there being no evidence of foul play, Valero and Sanchez were arrested and charged with murder. When the first trial failed to result in their conviction, the pair were tried again in 1913. This time, Valero and Sanchez were basically beaten into giving their confessions. In 1918 they were sentenced to prison time, though fortunately for them they did manage to narrowly avoid being sentenced to death, despite every effort made by the prosecution to see them killed for this crime they did not commit.

They were later exonerated when Grimaldos Lopez was discovered alive in a nearby town; apparently he had been living there the whole time. Oops.

No one would deny that thirty-four years is a very long time. And every one of those years must feel longer when you’re on death row, waiting for that fateful day when the guards will enter your cell with their heads bowed. Yet that’s exactly what Sakae Menda went through. He spent more than three decades on Japan’s death row for a crime he did not commit.

Menda was arrested in 1948 for the murder of a priest and his wife who lived nearby. The police held him for three weeks without access to a lawyer, and they tortured him into a confession. He was convicted in 1951, and spent those long thirty-four years in a solitary cell with virtually no human interaction, before finally being released.

Menda, now eighty-seven years old, currently works as an activist. In 2007 he delivered a speech against the death penalty to the World Congress. He has also lobbied the United Nations in the hope of abolishing capital punishment around the world.

Jeff would like you follow him on Twitter, but following him in any other fashion is a little creepy so please try to resist the urge.

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With 138 proven child murders behind him, and with a suspected total of at least four hundred, Luis Alfredo Garavito could by no means be left off of this list. According to a map on which Mr. Garavito indicated the locations of the remains of his various victims, his victims could easily exceed three hundred in number.

Previously a victim of sexual abuse himself, he would capture, torture, and rape boys between the ages of eight and sixteen years old, eventually ending their suffering by cutting their throats. Due to a twisted Columbian judicial system, Luis will be eligible for release in the near future.

Serhiy Tkach, a cruel and sadistic necrophiliac, is believed to have taken the lives of over one hundred Ukrainian women. He derived enjoyment from the post-suffocation rape of his victims, all of whom were young women between the ages of eight and eighteen. To add insult to injury, Tkach himself worked as a criminal investigator for the police. Despite a potential loss of faith in the authorities, Ukrainians can find solace in his life imprisonment.

Ahmad Suradji was a serial killer from Indonesia, responsible for the ritual murders of forty-two young females. He maintained that his father’s ghost visited him in a dream and told him to “kill seventy women and drink their saliva” in order to become a mystic healer. His incestuous sister-wives were implicated in the ritual murders, wherein women and girls ranging in age from eleven to thirty were strangled with a cable, after being buried waist-deep in dirt. Suradji was executed by firing squad in 2008.

Sergei Ryakhovsky, who at 280 pounds (125kg) was known as “The Hippopotamus,” could hardly be described as unintimidating. He made use of a plethora of murder techniques, including strangulation (either by rope or by hand), hanging, bodily mutilation, and stabbing. Among his more gruesome murders, Sergei hung, disemboweled and subsequently decapitated a sixteen-year old boy. He succumbed to tuberculosis in 2005.

Known by the seemingly bizarre name “The Chessboard Killer,” this deranged individual allegedly set out to kill as many people as there are spaces on a chessboard. He later refuted this claim, confessing that had he not been caught, he would have continued killing indeterminately.

Attracted to the idea of having power over the life or death of another person, Pichushkin explained that he felt like God while he was carrying out the murders. He would end the lives of his victims with a hammer blow to the head. Chillingly, he is quoted as saying “I killed in order to live, because when you kill, you want to live.” He is currently serving the first portion of his life sentence, which he must spend in solitary confinement.

If we wanted to establish a telltale sign that someone might be mentally unstable, perhaps it would be their theft of a chainsaw. That was only a one of the charges eventually laid against Robert Hansen, however—as might be expected of a man who just stole a chainsaw.

An avid hunter, he evidently grew bored of hunting animals and decided to upgrade to human females. He would capture his victims, tie them up, and then fly them to a desolate area where he would set them free in order to hunt them down. He will spend the rest of his life in jail.

Few would argue that murderers are anything but reprehensible, and fewer still would make that claim on behalf of child murderers. Amelia Dyer made a career out of so-called baby farming, whereby she would take in children in return for payment. She would comfort parents giving up their children by saying things such as “a child with me will have a good home and a mother’s love.”

Unfortunately for the parents, Dyer had no qualms about killing children. She is infamous for strangling the children by tying tape around their necks, and apparently enjoyed watching them slowly suffocate. As she put it herself: “I used to like to watch them with the tape around their neck, but it was soon all over with them.” Her murder spree was put to an end with her execution in 1896.

There is something particularly cruel about using the longing for love as a means of finding new victims to murder. Taking advantage of the personals section of a local French newspaper, Henry Landru lured in women under the pretense of starting a relationship. Once he managed to secure their trust so thoroughly as to gain access to their finances, he would promptly kill them and dispose of their bodies by burning them in his oven. This destruction of bodily evidence allowed him to evade police for a time, though eventually he was caught and—deservedly—executed.

Dagmar Overbye worked as a child caretaker, much like Amelia Dyer—and like her, she was a despicable murderer of children. Not only did she like to strangle children, but also to drown them, or to burn them alive in her masonry heater. She evidently felt no affinity for her own kin, as she even killed her own child. Perhaps she is the best example on this list of the serial killer’s utter depravity. Despite being initially sentenced to the death penalty, Danish authorities downgraded her punishment to life imprisonment. She died at the age of forty-two.

Westley Allan Dodd began his criminal career as a teenager. He would sexually molest children, some of them as young as two years old. Apparently, he had fantasies of cannibalizing the genitals of the children whose lives he took.

A homemade torture rack was among the items found at his home—though thankfully he was arrested before it could be put to use. Instead of attempting to escape the death penalty, Dodd actively embraced it, stating that he “must be executed before [he has] the opportunity to escape or kill someone within the prison.” If set free, he declared, then he would continue “killing and raping kids.” Eventually his wish was granted; he was executed by hanging in 1993.

When not attending lectures at UNC Chapel Hill, I usually spend my time reading, playing guitar or writing philosophy. I am particularly interested in that which cannot be explained.

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The Mormon Vault, a.k.a the Granite Mountain Records Vault, is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and is built 600-feet into the side of a giant rock in Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah. Although surrounded by rock (technically quartz—not granite), don’t think you can go dynamiting your way in there as it was constructed to withstand a nuclear blast and has steel, bank-safe type doors designed to seal tighter under impact. There are some administrative offices inside the complex, but it is not open to the public or even church members.

So, what kind of top secret stuff is a religious group squirreling away in an underground lair? Supposedly, just some humdrum genealogy records and other church documents. Still, a cavern capable of surviving the apocalypse does seem a little overkill for storing paperwork, which has led some to assume there are more mysterious things being kept in the bunker. For instance, Mormon detractors believe the vault contains discrepant church historical documents that are being suppressed to avoid making the church look bad or possibly prove the whole religion was fabricated.

Mormon leaders dismiss the conspiracy theories and say the reserve holds nothing more than microfilm and microfiche that the church is restoring and converting to digital media. They even have a “behind the scenes video tour” of Granite Mountain Records on YouTube.

The Pionen Bunker is a co-location center that rents secure space and bandwidth to a variety of retail customers. Currently, one of their most notable renters is WikiLeaks, the famous stateless news agency and unapologetic whistleblowers.

While multiple governments, corporations, and anyone else with major secrets to hide might wish WikiLeaks was more vulnerable, its servers are exceptionally safeguarded in the Pionen Bunker, a former civil defense center concealed in the side of White Mountain in Stockholm. The Swedish Internet service provider Bahnhof converted the fortified space into a data center and defended the bunker with a 40-centimeter thick door that’s only accessible by one tunnel and capable of withstanding a hydrogen bomb.

When you look at pictures of Pionen it resembles something straight out of a spy movie, complete with futuristic-looking panels of computers, a floating glass conference room, and everything surrounded by rough mountain walls. Somehow it seems like the perfect location for the white-haired WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.

JP Morgan and Chase has a couple of notable, highly-secure repositories. One of them is found five stories below street level in Manhattan, New York and, at over a football field in length, is regarded as the largest gold vault in the world. While the sheer size is impressive, some people are more interested in its proximity to the United States’ Federal Reserve Vault, as the two stockpiles are positioned right across the street from each other. Some conspiracists believe the two super-bunkers are connected by an underground tunnel and somehow JP Morgan and the government are in cahoots to manipulate the US economy.

The location of the bank’s other vault was a mystery until in March 2013 when Zerohedge discovered it was located in London below the firm’s office complex. It just so happens this subsurface bank is also next to a governmental reserve, the Bank of England, and the subway tunnel connecting the two coincidentally (or not if you’re a skeptic) shuts down every weekend.

As with any proper safe, both the JP Morgan vaults are capable of surviving a direct nuclear blast.

There are no shortages of conspiracy theories surrounding the Catholic Church (after all, Dan Brown made a career writing about the stuff), and a reoccurring theme is if the public could only gain entry to the Vatican Secret Archives then all the Church’s mysteries would be exposed.

Of course, Catholic officials say there is nothing clandestine going on in the centuries old, labyrinthine vault, and the things inside it aren’t so much “secret” as they are “private.” The archive is defended 24-hours a day by the Pontifical Swiss Guard, and is said to have vast storerooms and over 50 miles of shelves lined with documents dating back to the 8th Century.

To honor the archive’s 400th anniversary, and undoubtedly to quell suspicions, in 2012 the church put hundreds of Vatican artifacts on display at the Capitoline Museums. Some of the most notable pieces in the collection were court documents from the trial of the Knights Templar, papers from Galileo’s heresy trial, and a request for an annulment for Henry VIII.

Despite the church’s attempt at openness, critics say the contents aren’t accessible enough since only qualified clergy and academics are allowed inside the facility, and even those granted entry cannot view items without advanced approval.

Thus, the skeptics remain, with theories ranging from the cavern hiding gospels that contradict the Bible, to it housing the earliest known collection of pornography, and holding plans to control the world. Oddly enough, there’s even an urban legend floating around in some Mormon circles that the Vatican vaults have some missing books of the Bible which verify the Mormon religion is true.

While bankers protect their gold and religions guard their relics, to a fast food empire, nothing is more valuable than a secret recipe. For KFC, that precious recipe consists of the 11 undisclosed herbs and spices in Colonel Sander’s original fried chicken recipe.

In 2009, the recipe was given an upgraded safe in KFC’s headquarters in Kentucky. During the five months when the vault was being constructed, the recipe was kept in an undisclosed location and was transported in true secret agent style—via a lockbox handcuffed to the wrist of a security consultant.

Now the recipe is kept behind an assortment of state-of-the-art security technology, including motion detectors, cameras, and 24-hour guards. Thick concrete slabs surround the safe and the entire security system is connected to a backup generator.

And don’t try to convince the drive thru guy into revealing the restaurant’s chicken formula, since not even the president of KFC can get his hands on the recipe. Apparently only two company executives have permission to use the safe at any one time, and no one knows who they are. Also, they keep suppliers from getting wise by ordering the ingredients from multiple companies.

Naturally, some of the hype surrounding the recipe is just for publicity, but KFC is definitely serious about keeping it hush-hush. In 2001, they initiated a lawsuit against a couple who claimed they found the Colonel’s original recipe in one of his old homes.

The Scientologists are yet another religion with an impenetrable bunker shrouded in mystery (apparently God like secrets). Their vault is in an underground complex in a New Mexican desert, only a few hours drive from the alien hotspot Roswell, New Mexico.

Inside the cave, which is built to withstand a hydrogen bomb, are titanium caskets containing steel plates and gold discs inscribed with fundamental scientology teachings. All is shielded by three, 5,000 lb stainless steel doors. On the ground above the vault are crop circle-esque markings that are only distinguishable from the sky.

Naturally, most people assume the symbols are meant to communicate with extra-terrestrials, and former scientology members have confirmed the speculations by explaining the markings are meant to act as a landmark for future scientologists who visit Earth from different planets.

Still, others have said the symbols aren’t necessarily meant to signal aliens but represent a “return point” for church founder L. Ron Hubbard, who Scientologists believe will need to find his way back to the religious base after he is reincarnated.

Unless you’re in the upper echelons of Scientology, you’ll probably never catch a glimpse of this bizarre vault, as it’s defended with gates, armed guards, and security cameras.

Although Norway technically owns the Doomsday Seed Vault, funding is granted by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and other organizations and governments. Furthermore, the Norwegians give absolute ownership and right of entry to anyone using one of their safety deposit boxes.

As its name suggests, the vault, officially known as the Svalbard International Seed Vault, is designed to store a wide assortment of seeds in an effort to preserve crop diversity and assure humans will have a source of food no matter what earthly disasters occur.

The storage compound is located in Svalbard—one of the remotest places on the planet that’s still fairly accessible. Svalbard is a large, barren rock island in the Arctic Circle, and the vault is situated inside an old copper mine. As if the isolated landscape weren’t enough, the seed safe is defended with blast-proof doors, motion sensors, airlocks, and one meter thick steel reinforced concrete. Its unique climate and position should keep the seeds safe from any disaster, man-made or otherwise, for centuries.

Alas, even a seemingly straightforward seed cache hasn’t escaped the cynic’s watchful eye, as some find it curious that big names like Rockefeller and Bill Gates are interested in seed preservation. In one headline, investigative journalist William Engdahl wrote, “Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic—Bill Gates, Rockefellers and the GMO giants know something we don’t.”

There is suspicion that well-known philanthropists like Gates are giving sterilization vaccinations under the guise of humanitarian aid, while they really have plans to create some kind of master race. Apparently, the seeds tie in with their plot of global control and depopulation.

Iron Mountain Vault in Germantown, New York is a for-profit underground records storage facility that serves customers across the globe. It is found in an abandoned mine formerly used as a mushroom farm before being transformed into the largest subterranean records vault on the globe. Taking advantage of Cold War paranoia, the security company first opened in the 1950s and offered a way to shelter corporate documents amid nuclear attacks.

Today, ‘no trespassing signs’ surround the perimeter of the complex, and no one is allowed past the guard gate without two forms of I.D. and special clearance. A 28-ton, triple time-locked door blocks the 95-acre bunker, which is seven layers deep and buried a quarter mile into the mountain. Despite its extraordinary size and purpose, most Germantown residents don’t even know the facility exists.

On a side note, Bill Gates is storing items in this vault too, so maybe he does know something we don’t.

Switzerland is practically synonymous with secret vaults, as banks throughout the country provide their customers complete anonymity and a no-questions-asked attitude. While the deposit boxes are highly guarded, the real protection comes from the doctor-patient type of confidentiality the bankers take with their clients. A great many of their customers aren’t even Swiss citizens but tax evaders, corrupt officials, mobsters, dictators, and general cheats from America and beyond. The banks deny helping anyone to engage in criminal activity, yet one former mid-level Swiss banker divulged that he personally helped his clients defraud the US Treasury out of billions of dollars in taxes.

However, his breach of privacy is rare considering Swiss law is especially strict on any violation of confidentiality in banking or commerce, and committing such an offense can result in jail time or a substantial fine.

In many cases, banking customers are so desperate to remain unidentified they specifically ask their Swiss bankers to never contact them. Interestingly, this has resulted in billions of unclaimed money that’s left dormant once the owner dies. Recently, many banks in Switzerland are working to unite some of the forgotten funds with relatives of the original bank clients, but it’s proving a difficult task that requires a private detective like approach, and even when inheritors are found some assume they’re being scammed and refuse to talk to the bank.

The Antwerp Diamond Vault in Belgium is best known for two reasons: for being the world’s most impenetrable diamond safe and, contrarily, being the victim of a baffling diamond heist in 2003.

The vault was originally built by a collection of 1500 diamond merchants and houses around 70% of the world’s diamonds. Obviously, the founders took great efforts to secure their valuables and outfitted it with un-matched security equipment, including heat detectors, Doppler radar, seismic sensors, magnetic fields, and a lock with over 100 million possible combinations that was designed to shut down for hours if the wrong code was entered in twice. Furthermore, the door itself was three tons, constructed of solid steel, and would’ve required 12-hours of non-stop drilling to penetrate.

Regardless of the multi-tiered security system, a ring of Italian thieves known as “The School of Turin” broke in and stole $100 million worth of diamonds and other treasures. In true “Oceans 11” style, they set off no alarms and Antwerp officials weren’t aware of the breach until the next morning when they arrived at the Diamond Center and discovered their safe gaping open and ransacked.

The booty was never found, but police did arrest one man, Leonardo Notarbartolo, based on DNA evidence found at the scene. He claims a diamond merchant hired his team for the heist and it was all part of an elaborate plan to fraud the insurance company.

The Antwerp Diamond Center has since upped its security even more, yet it seems the 2003 incident has shown that even the most sophisticated vault is no match for a truly determined criminal mastermind.

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Race relations are always a touchy subject—and they were at the heart of the 1984 case of Darryl Hunt, an African-American man from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. At the age of nineteen, Hunt was convicted of the rape and murder of a white woman named Deborah Sykes—despite the fact that there was no physical evidence tying him to the crimes. Even with zero evidence pointing to Hunt, he was sentenced by an all-white jury to life in prison.

In 1994, Hunt was actually cleared of the rape when DNA testing proved he had never committed that crime. Despite the rape being central to the overall crime, he spent an additional nine years in prison until a man named Willard Brown confessed to both acts. So after nineteen years of life in prison, Hunt was finally exonerated in 2004. Since being released from prison, he has worked with The Innocence Project and founded the Darryl Hunt Project for Freedom and Justice, as well as the Darryl Hunt Freedom Fighters, in order to help other wrongfully convicted men and women.

It would be nice to think that police planting evidence and framing suspects only existed in movies and on television, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately for Arthur Allan Thomas, those two things are all too real—and in 1971, they helped lead to his conviction for two murders he did not commit. A man and woman named Jeanette and Harvey Crewe had been murdered in their home in Waikato, New Zealand. It would later be discovered that the police had planted a cartridge from Thomas’s rifle in the couple’s garden.

Thomas was actually convicted twice for the same crime, having lost an appeal along the way. There was finally a royal commission which uncovered the suspicious actions of the police throughout the investigation, which Thomas says includes using things he told them against him. Thomas has been out of prison for more than thirty years, but his family is still seeking justice in the form of charges against the police responsible. Of course at this point that’s not really possible, as the two men who fabricated the evidence are both dead.

Unlike the rest of the people on this list, Richard Jewell was never actually convicted of any crime—but he is here because in 1996 he became one of the most infamous men on the planet. That’s because when a bomb exploded at the Olympic Games in Atlanta, it was Jewell whom the FBI said was the chief suspect in this act of terror.

At the time, Jewell was a thirty-four-year-old security guard. He’d spotted a suspicious package in the Olympic Village and reported it to the authorities. Shortly afterwards, it exploded—killing one person and injuring more than one hundred others.

Basically, because Jewell had done his job, he became the prime suspect in the bombing—and he was quickly villainized. He was cleared of any charges in October of that same year—but that was well after he had been found guilty in the court of public opinion. Like many cases of the wrongfully accused and convicted, the Jewell case exhibited several aspects of botched police work, such as the FBI questioning him under the pretense of “creating a training video”—which, if you couldn’t already guess, is all kinds of wrong.

Children can be handfuls—just ask any parent. They can be especially rambunctious and hard to deal with for a single parent, but even Thomas Kennedy probably never suspected just how horribly his own children could behave until he wound up being sentenced to fifteen years in prison for a despicable crime—which, as it turned out, he had never committed. The crime was rape, and the accuser was his then-eleven-year-old daughter, Casandra.

After nine years had passed, Casandra came forward and finally admitted to lying about the rape, and Thomas was exonerated. You might be wondering what on earth could possess a daughter to make up such an awful story about her father. Well, in her own words, she “was upset because [she] felt he wasn’t around enough.” We hate to break it to her, but if he wasn’t around enough before, getting him shipped off to prison for fifteen years wasn’t exactly going to help.

When you are convicted of murder at the age of seventeen and sentenced to life in prison, it must be pretty tough to handle. That’s especially true when you are innocent—and even more so when it is later determined that racism had played a huge factor throughout the entire process. That’s what happened in 1971 to Donald Marshall, Jr., a Mi’kmaq man from Canada, when he was accused of murdering his friend, Sandy Seale.

Marshall was released from prison eleven years later after another witness came forward saying that someone else had stabbed Seale. Now Marshall was not exactly a model citizen; as it turns out, he and Seale had gone out and confronted a man, who wound up stabbing Seale. But being an idiot kid is no reason to spend more than a decade in prison. Even when he was acquitted, the judge basically still blamed this miscarriage of justice on Marshall himself, stating he was “the author of his own misfortune.” The prosecution had also failed to disclose evidence and had supposedly coerced witness testimony—which the judge, presumably, also blamed on Marshall.

In 1977, Dewey Bozella was an eighteen-year-old kid from a rough neighborhood who inexplicably found himself the prime suspect in the murder of a ninety-two year old woman. Despite the fact that there was not a shred of evidence tying him to the murder, and that the two key witnesses were known criminals who had changed their stories, Bozella was sentenced to a minimum of twenty years in Sing Sing, one of the most notorious prisons in America.

Bozella was retried in 1990 and offered the chance to go free—if only he would admit to his guilt and remorse. While some may have jumped at the chance for freedom, Bozella refused to admit to something he did not do, and was re-convicted. The Innocence Project caught wind of his case and tracked down some evidence which eventually resulted in Bozella being set free in 2009.

In June 1982, forty-nine gold bars were stolen from the Perth Mint in Western Australia, at an estimated worth of more than two million dollars in today’s money. Police quickly suspected three brothers—Ray, Peter, and Brian Mickelberg—of the crime, and they were quickly found guilty and sentenced to a long period in prison. As you can probably guess, they didn’t do it.

The Perth Mint Swindle, at it is commonly known, remains unsolved to this day—but the Mickelbergs weren’t cleared of all charges until 2004. The brothers have repeatedly stated that police framed them from the start. Brian was released after less than two years but died in a plane crash soon afterwards, while Ray and Peter served eight and six years in jail, respectively. In 2002, a police officer who had working on the case admitted to having fabricated evidence, and also beating Brian while he was in custody.

For this one, we are going to hop into the time machine and go way back to 1894 to one of the most famous miscarriages of justice in history. Chances are, you have at least heard of the Dreyfus Affair in passing—but there’s also probably an equal chance that you thought it was about the escapades of that guy who played Hooper in Jaws.

Instead, the Affair has to do with Alfred Dreyfus, a French soldier convicted of treason, who as punishment was sent to the infamous Devil’s Island penal colony.

The case is one steeped in anti-Semitism. Dreyfus, a captain, had been accused of giving information to the Germans—but two years later it was discovered that another French soldier named Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy had in fact been the real traitor. But with Dreyfus—an Alsatian Jew—already in prison, some of the higher-ups in the military managed to keep the new evidence quiet until 1899, when he was brought back to France for a new trial. Still, it was not until 1906 that he was finally exonerated, and by then much of France had been divided by the scandal surrounding the entire affair.

Stop us if you’ve heard this before: a successful doctor is accused of and convicted for the murder of his wife—despite the doctor repeatedly proclaiming his innocence and telling police about a struggle with a man in his house on the night of the murder. He is later cleared of the murder. If you’re thinking it sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the plot of the TV show and movie The Fugitive. It’s also exactly what happened to Dr. Sam Sheppard, the man who served as the inspiration for the fictional character of Richard Kimble.

Sheppard was convicted in 1954, despite evidence backing up his story that he didn’t actually do it. According to reports, the investigating police completely overlooked some pretty obvious signs of sexual assault, primarily because they believed Sheppard was the killer—and signs of rape did not really fit with that theory.

Blood was also found in the home which did not match that of Sheppard, his wife, or their kids. Sheppard was eventually exonerated in 1966, but the case had taken an enormous toll on him and he died four years later of liver disease, almost completely ruined both financially and emotionally.

Gerry Conlon is one of the most famous wrongfully-convicted men in the world, having been part of the Guilford Four and Maguire Seven who were falsely imprisoned for an Irish Republican Army bombing in England in 1974.

At the time, Conlon was twenty years old. He was arrested in connection with the bombing of a pub in the town of Guilford, which had killed five people—arrested in spite of the fact that he had never even been to that town. He and three other people, who would collectively become known as the Guilford Four, endured days of torture at the hands of the police before finally confessing to crimes they knew they had not commited.

Along with Conlon, his father Giuseppe and six others, who became known as the Maguire Seven, were arrested and imprisoned when shoddy evidence pointed to them seemingly having handled the explosives. Ultimately, the Guilford Four and Maguire Seven were exonerated once new evidence came to light that the police had fabricated evidence and coerced the confessions. The story of Gerry Conlon was later turned into the movie In the Name of the Father.

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