Crimes that have stayed with you for years

StefanFal wrote: »

You have a twisted mind posting this. Jesus Christ

The thread is called Crimes that have stayed with you for years, not "Crimes which only I want to read about because im of a nervous disposition". You have some cheek to make that comment.

Germanwings flight 9525.
Over 150 poor people murdered by a sick nut job flying the plane. The absolute terror they must have gone through in those last few seconds knowing they were all out to plough into the mountain.

These three were horrific.

Manuela Riedo killed in Galway by Gerald Barry while he was on bail. She was an only child. Terrible.

Jill Meagher in Melbourne, killed by another who should have been on remand, Adrian Bayley.

Karen Buckley, murdered in Glasgow. A very sad case.

Jon Jonsson the Icelandic man. Gone without a trace. His poor wife must have had an awful shock when she realised.

Strange one that for sure.

Febreeze wrote: »

There is footage of him leaving the hotel and then it turns off after that. No idea if he walked down the Whitehall road towards the airport or the other way towards town. There's no footage of him on buses and not one taxi man has come forward to confirm they collected him or dropped him off anywhere. Just gone. The shops down the road didn't have any footage of him walking by. There has been rumours of a gambling tournament around the time of his dissappearance so no one knows if there's a link there. From what I know there's still a huge poster of him on the Whitehall Road.

You'd think in this day and age that CCTV would capture your every move. Not in his case though. It is kind of strange no doubt. But who knows what happened. From what I can remember there was a Poker Tournament in the hotel alright. But nothing to connect that to his disappearance.

YFlyer wrote: »

Won't be listening to that.

Me neither. It's a bit voyeuristic or whatever the equivalent word is for audio.

Junko Furuta, The Concrete-encased high school girl murder case

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Junko_Furuta

NoviGlitzko wrote: »

The most heartbreaking was the Junko Furita case. My heart breaks for her.

God that's a horrific case. That poor poor girl. Devastating to read what she suffered through.

Febreeze wrote: »

There is footage of him leaving the hotel and then it turns off after that. No idea if he walked down the Whitehall road towards the airport or the other way towards town. There's no footage of him on buses and not one taxi man has come forward to confirm they collected him or dropped him off anywhere. Just gone. The shops down the road didn't have any footage of him walking by. There has been rumours of a gambling tournament around the time of his dissappearance so no one knows if there's a link there. From what I know there's still a huge poster of him on the Whitehall Road.

That case is a real head scratcher, he was on CCTV but then vanished into thin air. The only thing I can think of is that he did indeed take a taxi somewhere but the driver was an unlicensed and illegal migrant who wont come forward.

The Christopher Watts case from the States is another terrible case.

Put me off buses and Canada

The killing of Tim McLean occurred on the evening of July 30, 2008. McLean, a 22-year-old Canadian man, was stabbed, beheaded and cannibalized while riding a Greyhound Canada bus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tim_McLean

The horrifying case of the 2 little girls from a poor Arab quarter in Brussels who were kidnapped and held in an underground torture chamber close to their hime in Belgium - there had been a child who witnessed their kidnap and gave almost the entire ref & a description of the man - a inown convicted paedophile who had a distinctive car but due to the bungling of the federal police & infighting & politics they missed the lead & messed the case up entirely. The little girls were held underground and raped and tortured for years. Horrifying. 199O’s. The whole city shut diwn and was in disbelief at the utter incompetence of the oolice. Every building and lamppost had a white ribbon tied around it to signify their deaths and public sympathy. Chilling.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Dutroux


Madeline McCann - a horror story that gets even more revolting to think about and chilling with every passing week and update. God help her and her family.

Featured recently in the Indo - the American student, last seen in Enniskerry with a man buying cake & tea for her at that teas ship at the minument in the village, and possibly later in Johnny Foxes thou this is now disputed. Annie McCarrick. Her father was a retured poiceman in New York and flew to Ireland and could not believe the incompetence and utter disinterest by the Irish gardaí - her bags of groceries left unopened in the kitchen table, and her friends coming the following day for dinner - she vanished into thin air after going walking in the villages around Dublin mountains. Her father offered 100,000 reward but nobody ever came forward and she dissappeared into thin air.


The horror of the husband of the shoplifter Margaret Ward - so called ‘homeless’ itinerant with multiple kids - who broke into an 80+ year old frail widows house in Bray, beat her to a pulp and threatened to cut off her fingers to get the gold from her wedding ring off her fingers. The lady was so terrorised that she never recovered and could never go back to live in her home again but had to go into care.

There have been so many similar cases wuth frail elderly men and women being terrorised from their rural homes and their lifes savings being taken - including a similar story with an elderly batchelir farmer who was beaten, tied to a chair, his life savings taken, and him left to die aline and terrified over 4 long horrific days - again - criminal vermin with decades of convictions bleating their pathetic excuse stories and getting endless free legal aid to defend the indefensible.

Finally - the crime that has been 30+ years fought by the families of the teenagers burned to death in a dublin disco whose firedoors were claimed to be chained shut, and whose illegal renovations and illegal storage of highly volatile and flamable solvents close to the dance floor are alleged to have been a major contributiry cause of the inferno that killed, mutilated and ruined so many lives. They are atill fighting for justice. The Stardust.

And to add final year of nightmares for oeople who are chilled to the bone by accidents and crimes involving fire, The Stationhouse fire in New Jersey. Overcrowdinng, misuse of license, illegal use of pyritechnicics. The videos on the survivors stories are harrowing. Worse still, the entire event and devestating fire was being filmed for a fire safety promo. If you were involved or affected by the Stardust or any fire I would advise you never to watch it. The most calm and chilling 8 minute horrorstory that will have you up nights in cold sweats and checking your fire alarms and childrens bedrooms and electronics hourly.

In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government they survive as soldiers of fortune....

Aside from those already mentioned, Rachel O’Reilly’s case has always stayed with me.
How that man had the arrogance to sit next to her grieving mother on the Late Late Show, pleading for information from the public about his wife’s killer when he had murdered her in cold blood, is something I’ll never comprehend.
Disgusting human being who should never be released.

Philip Cairns was probably the one for me .. just disappeared and definitely one that stood out as I was around same age.
Reading over this thread and the Irish cases are horrific to think so much evil in a small country.
I remember Hillsborough as a young lad , sitting down to watch the match with my dad , I can still see those poor peoples faces being slowly suffocated and crushed.
While I would read about murders and kidnappings or see them on news but watching people die on the tv definitely is imprinted in my memory.
A few of the bombs in NI also stand out particularly enniskillen and Omagh .

Two similar crimes stand out to me - both occurring around the same time in Dublin, and exposing the society we have become.

First, the murder of Pawel Kalite and Mariusz Szwajkos by David Curran in 2008 (very briefly mentioned upthread). Two Polish men who came here to work hard and contribute to the country. Features classic symptoms of what we are told is minor crime, "just" anti social behaviour etc - man goes to chipper and gets deliberately bumped into by "children" loitering outside and a minor scuffle ensues. As is often the case, the situation was inflamed by a teenage girl (who never saw the inside of a jail) who rang scumbag David Curran (just 17 at the time) who arrived and stabbed both men in the head with a screwdriver.

The murder of those two chaps received a lot of attention at the time, but I think the later (2010) killing of Lukasz Rzeszutko was in some ways almost more horrifying but it got far less attention - probably because there were no witnesses (unlike the case above). Again, a hard working Polish man struck down by scumbags loitering looking for trouble. In this case, there wasn't even a rudimentary "reason" for the attack as in the above case - Lukasz was walking to work (at about 4.30am) when three scumbags decided to "give him a few slaps" on the pretext of asking for a cigarette - they did it "for a buzz" according to one. He was so badly beaten that his workmates (who found him) didn't recognise him and part of his brain came out his nose. Despite this, only one of the attackers (just 18 at the time) was found guilty of murder, with the other two (one with 55 previous convictions, and out on bail at the time) getting away with a manslaughter conviction.

I think both cases shine a light on Irish society and what they reveal ain't pretty. Young, unemployed scumbags hanging around just looking to cause trouble, unmolested by Gardai and given a life of plenty by a ridiculously generous social welfare system - these people's behaviour and crimes are excused by the social care system and the media (and some posters on here) and they prey upon the very workers that pay their social welfare. Just look at the ages of the murderers - 17 and 18 - still kids in many respects yet so far down the road of scumbaggery that there is no turning back - yet many in NGOs and the media refer to these people as 'vulnerable'!

Hammer Archer wrote: »

For people around my parents age in the area I grew up, it was the Una Lynskey abduction and murder.
She was a 19 year old civil servant who lived on the Fairyhouse side of Ratoath in Meath. In October 1971, she got off a bus from Dublin at the end of the lane she lived on and started to make the short walk home. She never made it there.
Around the time of her disappearance, a black car was seen parked on the lane she lived on. Local Gardaí knew that a local teenager, Dick Donnelly, owned a black Zypher and came to the conclusion that he and two other locals, Martin Conmey and Martin Kerrigan, abducted and probably murdered her.

Several witnesses stated that they didn't see these three guys in the car but subsequently claimed that they were assaulted by the Gardaí in Trim so that they'd change their statement to say they had seen them.
The three accused were also assaulted and deprived of sleep by the Gardaí. I think even Una's mother was brought into the interrogation to try and get them to say where the body was. Two of them signed a vague statement after nearly two days without sleep saying that she somehow ended up dead. Obviously, given that Una's mother was shown who the suspects were and were assured by the Gardaí that they had killed her, the wider Lynskey family now knew.

In December, Una Lynskey's body was found in the Dublin mountains. Just over a week later, Martin Kerrigan was bundled into a car by Una's brothers and her cousin, driven to the mountains and murdered. They were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 3 years each.
The two remaining accused, Conmey and Donnelly, were both found guilty of the manslaughter of Una and were also jailed for three years. Donnelly was released on appeal but Conmey's conviction stuck. It wasn't until 2010 that Conmey's conviction was quashed and in 2014 it was declared a miscarriage of justice.

It turned out that there were a number of reports of a similar black car with a UK reg around the Dublin area. One witness reported seeing a woman struggling in a black car in a petrol station on the Naas Road on the night Una Lynskey disappeared. These reports were ignored by the Gardaí on the case as they zeroed in on the three innocent men from the start. Una Lynskey's murderer was never found.

TG4 produced an excellent documentary on the case and on Martin Conmey's fight to clear his name.
https://www.tg4.ie/en/player/home/?pid=5830752729001&teideal=Finn%C3%A9&series=Finn%C3%A9&dlft=35

I never even heard of this case or has it turned up in any of the true crime books I have read .. it’s sounds shocking

coinop wrote: »

Channon Gail Christian, aged 21, and Hugh Christopher Newsom, Jr., aged 23, were from Knoxville, Tennessee. They were kidnapped on the evening of January 6, 2007, when Christian's vehicle was carjacked, and taken to a rental house, where both of them were raped, tortured, and murdered.



Newsom's body was discovered near a set of nearby railroad tracks. He had been bound, blindfolded, gagged, and stripped naked from the waist down. He had been shot in the back of the head, neck, and back, and his body had been set on fire.

Christian died after hours of torture, sustaining traumatic brain injuries and suffering injuries to her vagina, anus, and mouth due to repeated sexual assault. Before killing her, in an effort to remove DNA evidence, her attackers poured bleach down her throat and scrubbed her body with it. She was bound with curtains and strips of bedding, with her face covered with a trash bag and her body stashed in five large trash bags. These were placed inside a residential waste disposal unit and covered with sheets and garbage from Wendy's. The medical examiner said there was evidence that Christian slowly suffocated to death.

Four males and one female were arrested, charged, and convicted in the case, four of whom had multiple prior felony convictions.



What crime cases were so horrible that they have stuck in your mind years after reading about them?

Awful crime indeed, but it seems like a fairly obscure example to pick. Was there are any particular attribute of the depraved criminals involved in this dreadful case that caused it to stick in your mind perhaps?

The attack on the couple in Cratloe, Co. Clare in 2004. (link) stands out for me, because it's relatively local, I've been in the carpark it happened in a number of times, and the perertrators still crop up in the news for continued scumbaggery from time to time.

A couple in their 30s in the carpark of the popular woods were attacked by the 5 guys wielding a golf club, a screw driver, a wheel brace and a shovel, and forced out of their car. They hit they woman when she refused to give one of the scumbags a kiss. The man worked as a bouncer, and had a retractable baton. The scumbags assumed he was a Garda, shouting "he's a cop, do him", and instead of this making them back off, they beat him and bundled him into the boot of his car. While locked in there, the five scumbags took turns raping the woman on the bonnet, one of the shouting "me next!". When thw woman tried to resist, they threatened to burn the car with him locked inside it. They took a break then to open the boot and beat the man again with the golf club. At some stage, he managed to escape and flag down a passing motorist.

Three of the perpetrators were 16. One was 24. The final one was just 14 when they carried out the attack. One of the 16 year olds, Thomas O'Neill, was described as the ringleader of the gang in court.

O'Neill was sentenced to 10 years, but when he got out, he shacked up with April Collins, who was previously a partner of notorious Limerick gangster and total scumbag Ger Dundon. She later gave evidence against the Dundons, resulting in their imprisonment and the collapse of the gang.

Apologies for the Sun link, but here's the happy scumbag couple, not a care in the world: https://www.thesun.ie/news/1874348/april-collins-evil-rapist-hubby-slashed-in-the-back-in-a-vicious-attack-leaving-him-fearing-for-his-safety/

In contrast, one of the others convicted of the attack and rape hanged himself in prison, leaving a note apologising for his crimes.

https://www.herald.ie/news/rapist-says-sorry-before-hanging-himself-in-cell-27998881.html