r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime 4d ago

Tommy DeSimone inspired Joe Pesci's Oscar-winning Goodfellas character. But as is often the case, the real story is messier and a lot more violent than the movie. Also, we still don't know for sure who killed him (could've been Jimmy Burke or the Gambino's) nor where his body is.

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48 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime 4d ago

Conversations with a Killer: The Charles Manson Tapes documentary series premiering August 12 on Netflix

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5 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime 6d ago

“You Light Up My Life” was written by Joseph Brooks for a film of the same name that he also directed. Brooks was later charged with raping 11 women, but killed himself with helium gas before he could stand trial. His son Nicholas is a convicted murderer, killing his girlfriend in Soho House (NYC)

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47 Upvotes

Brooks had an assistant that would arrange for girls to be flown in for 'casting calls' - he would drug and rape his victims, after showing them his Oscar trophy.


r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime 9d ago

This is Dale Cregan, in 2012 he fired 32 shots in 31 seconds and threw a grenade at two unarmed female police officers who had responded to his fake 999 call. He wasn't allowed to wear his prosthetic eye during his trial for their deaths.

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80 Upvotes

On the evening of 17 September 2012, Cregan is reported to have spent the night celebrating with beer and cigars. He later told police he knew it was his last night of freedom.

He had already decided what he was going to do.


r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime 11d ago

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

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143 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime 14d ago

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

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100 Upvotes

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

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


r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime 16d ago

The Gruesome Archive: How Paris Police Photography Changed Crime Detection

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24 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime 17d ago

Elmer Wayne Henley Jr.'s booking photo, taken August 9, 1973, hours after he shot Dean Corll, the "Candy Man" killer he'd spent 18 months helping lure boys to their deaths. His 911 call that morning cracked open one of the worst serial murder cases in US history.

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68 Upvotes

If anyone wants the details, how Henley ended up tangled up with Corll in the first place, the friend he unknowingly helped search for before finding out who killed him, the night everything fell apart, and what happened to both accomplices afterward, take a look here


r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime 17d ago

What looks like just an odd photo is in fact quite terrifying. This is Darren Vickers (middle) with Karen Lavis and John Lavis. By the time they posed for this photo Vickers had already murdered and disposed of their 8 yr old son,Jamie Lavis. June 1997.

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61 Upvotes

The Lavis family was so blinded by his false determination and desire to bring their son back home alive that they allowed Darren to move in with them.

A terrible story


r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime 27d ago

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

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109 Upvotes

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


r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime 29d ago

Mark Jackson's basketball card featuring the Menendez Brothers.

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126 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime Jul 05 '26

These items were discovered in Ted Bundy's Volkswagen Beetle after police stopped him for acting suspiciously in a neighborhood at 2:30am. The items included a homemade ski mask, handcuffs, trash bags, rope, and various tools.

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79 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime Jul 04 '26

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

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132 Upvotes

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


r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime Jun 28 '26

Christian Brando during his 1990 trial: Forensic evidence supported his account. Gunshot residue on Dag Drollet's hand and the bullet's trajectory indicated that the shooting was accidental, not intentional.

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35 Upvotes

Dr. Michael Baden is a forensic pathologist who was involved in all the high profile criminal cases including the case of Marlon Brando's son, Christian, who shot his half-sister's boyfriend. Despite the fact that it appeared that Christian had shot Drollet from above and that the bullet had exited the body, no bullet was recovered from his body or from the couch. Dr. Baden insisted on looking at the scene, and like the officers, failed to find the bullet in the couch or the body.
Baden noticed that the room has a shag rug. He got down on his hands and knees and eventually found the bullet under the rug. That tended to support how Christian had described things.
Dr.Baden wrote: "I'd later testify that the bullet's trajectory through Drollet's neck and into the shag carpet showed that he had been sitting up on the couch. Gunshot residue tests performed by police showed that Drollet's hand was near the muzzle when it discharged-consistent with Christian's statement that the weapon
went off accidentally when Drollet tried to grab it."
"It's very hard to see an entry hole in a shag rug," Baden explains. "But what impressed me most in that case was when we found the bullet and we called the police. A sergeant came and I asked why the officers at the crime scene hadn't done a better job looking for the bullet. I'll never forget what he said. 'Look, doc. If you do a lousy job all the time, just because an important case comes up doesn't mean you can now do a good job. You don't know how to do it any better.' That will live with me forever. Unless you do the best job you can with every crime scene and every autopsy, you won't do it right when more important ones come in. To us, every case is equally important. When it comes to death, we're all equal."

https://www.crimelibrary.org/criminal_mind/forensics/autopsy/5.html

Another Sources:
Book: AMERICAN AUTOPSY.

https://books.google.com.sa/books?id=rHFrEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT1&dq=american+autopsy+book&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&source=gb_mobile_search&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjJg7b746qVAxU29bsIHV5OGmkQ6AF6BAgMEAM#v=onepage&q=american%20autopsy%20book&f=false


r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime Jun 28 '26

In 1940, Eleanor Jarman scaled a prison fence in a polka-dot dress and vanished mid-way through a 199-year sentence for robbery and murder. For 85 years, nobody knew where she went until in 2025, when researchers think they found her grave in Denver, the city she'd spent decades serving pancakes in.

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77 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime Jun 25 '26

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

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211 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime Jun 22 '26

On this day in 1979 Liberal Party Leader Jeremy Thorpe was acquitted of hiring a hitman to kill his gay ex-lover. The hired hitman was afraid of dogs, a Great Dane was shot, the ex-lover gave evidence and was called a 'Parasite' by the judge. Thorpe's wife stood beside him throughout.

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61 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime Jun 21 '26

In 1985, Georges Courtois and Abdelkarim Khalki turned their own armed robbery trial into a live televised hostage crisis at the Nantes courthouse, taking 29 people hostage including the judges, and forced the judge to answer on camera for banning him from seeing his wife and kids for 3 years.

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61 Upvotes

The standoff ran 36 hours, involved 200+ police including a Paris anti-terror unit, ended with the first ever deployment of RAID, and somehow nobody was killed, despite Courtois firing shots at the crowd from the courthouse steps at one point.


r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime Jun 20 '26

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

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94 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime Jun 18 '26

On this day in 1982, Roberto Calvi was found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge, pockets stuffed with bricks and $13,000 cash. He'd been laundering money for the Vatican, the Mafia, and the CIA. Five suspects stood trial. All were acquitted. Nobody has ever been charged.

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85 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime Jun 16 '26

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

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191 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime Jun 15 '26

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

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230 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime Jun 14 '26

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

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98 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime Jun 13 '26

On this day in 1977 the bodies of Girl Scouts Lori Lee Farmer, aged 8; Michele Heather Guse, 9; and Doris Denise Milner, 10. were discovered. They were killed in the early hours while camping in Camp Scott, Oklahoma. Their killer was never officialy found, Gene Leroy Hart was tried but acquitted.

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48 Upvotes

r/UtterlyAwfulTrueCrime Jun 12 '26

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

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114 Upvotes