Law enforcement officials have read this thread. The question was simple: who was the one that got away? When have you been sure of a person’s guilt but, for whatever reason, couldn’t bring them to justice? I couldn’t count the times I spent a whole day getting signed witness statements, filing signed complaints, recording a victim of domestic abuse giving her statement on audio and video, only to have her drop the charges because he said, “She loves me, and it won’t happen again.
” Those are the ones that always get away. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Those other cases, though, the ones that make you want to clock out and go home. My friend’s dad is a criminal lawyer, and he’s fought and won for people he himself admitted to us afterward were clearly guilty.
I asked him how he could defend someone who’d stolen from others, sometimes even murdered them. He told me something that stuck with me ever since: a doctor is expected to give his patient the best fighting chance at life, regardless of what kind of person he is. So here’s a real story. My dad was a Fed and once prosecuted a case where a father blew up his wife and infant son in his truck and tried to make it look like the explosive in the pickup bed went off by accident.
The trial really tore my pop up. It was a difficult case to prove, and he was convinced in every way that mattered that the guy did it, simply because it was physically impossible for the explosive to have gone off the way the defense claimed. I’ll admit I can’t remember exactly why — this was twenty-five years ago — but my dad is an explosives expert and has trained hundreds of officers. And somehow, the guy convinced the jury to exonerate him.
Man, was my pop pissed. He talked in tears about seeing parts of the baby hanging from a tree. Bad times. I talked to my dad afterward and got some details I’d forgotten or never knew.
The explosive was Tovex, which I guess is used in mining. The motive was insurance. And it turns out the guy actually did get convicted of manslaughter and served time, but only a few years. It’s the kind of compromising from jurors that can be very frustrating for law enforcement.
My dad arrested a guy about two decades ago on suspected murder charges. The guy pulled a gun on my dad, who full-on tackled the perp. Sadly, there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him of murder. He still went in for a few years for pulling a gun on a cop.
My dad was sure this guy was guilty. He got out a few years back, but the guy did eventually get caught. A cop pulled him over for a suspected DUI, and this genius pulled a gun on this cop too. However, this cop wasn’t quite as daring as my dad — he shot the guy fatally.
My grandfather was a cop in a small town with very little crime. Every day he’d go to the same cafe for a cup of coffee. A man recruited a partner to go on a murder spree, but they only had one gun. The first step of the plan was to fake a fight out back of the cafe, and when my grandfather responded, they’d jump him and steal his gun.
Luckily, the man’s partner backed out at the last second, and they never executed step one of their plan. The man changed his plans and ended up killing a cab driver instead. My grandfather, ironically, was the one who apprehended him, and the man told him the whole story. He also told my grandfather he was going to fake being insane and would eventually walk out of the mental hospital.
My grandfather told this to the judge, but the judge said it wasn’t admissible. The man ended up walking out of the mental hospital, fled to California, and brutally murdered at least two other people. One thing that always gets me thinking about that story is that if the two of them had gone through with their plan and killed my grandfather, I wouldn’t be here today. The thought kind of weirds me out.
In my hometown, there was a twenty-two-year-old college student who lived with his parents. He wasn’t doing very well in school, and the school in question was expensive, so his parents decided to stop paying for college and figured maybe he should get a real job. The kid was pissed and decided the best thing to do would be to kill his parents. So he bought an axe and used it in a manner that resulted in their deaths.
It was quite gruesome. I remember hearing that the father took a blow to the head and was knocked out. He didn’t die right away — rather, he woke up a few hours after his son left and stumbled around the house with partial brain damage before dying from blood loss. The police in this town hadn’t had a crime this horrific in thirty years.
Proper procedure was not followed. Not only was evidence at the crime scene not preserved, but the scene was basically trashed. The whole department tracked bloody footprints everywhere. Evidence was moved or misplaced.
They had no witnesses. They were unable to even file charges against the son, even though the circumstantial evidence was fairly compelling. Quite something to get away with. Looks like I got the biggest detail completely wrong.
In fact, the guy was convicted. But the police mishandling of the case was true. Additionally, it seems the mother of the murderer actually maintained her son’s innocence even during the trial. Apparently he had also attempted to murder her.
She survived, but she didn’t recall the incident. Although I now work for a large policing service in network admin, this particular tale goes back to my much younger days working as campus security at a big Canadian university. This campus is at the top of a small mountain, which is relevant to the story. My buddy and I were called to check out an accident.
When we arrived, we found a single car a good ten feet off the road, facing the edge of a cliff. Another ten feet or so and they would have been several hundred feet further down on the highway below, or into the ocean. The dude behind the wheel was so drunk he couldn’t comprehend what was going on at all. His pal in the backseat, or rather lying on the floor in the back, was out cold.
They were both covered in blood, as were most surfaces of the car, but it looked like it was all from a bar fight. There didn’t appear to be any injuries from running off the road. My partner and I were trained in first aid and had all our kits in our car, but we called dispatch to get the real cops up there fast. The dude behind the wheel apparently thought this would be a good time to leave, so he hit the gas to take off and started steering toward the edge to get away from us.
Fortunately, the car wasn’t running. I was trying to see if the guy in the back was still breathing while my partner tried to talk to the driver. The dude realized why the car wasn’t moving and started to fumble with the keys. My partner swiftly and carefully removed and pocketed the keys without the dude realizing what was happening.
About ten minutes later, the police arrived along with an ambulance. We shook our heads at these idiots and were thankful they didn’t kill themselves or anyone else. Everyone went away. Then it went to court.
The driver fought the drunk driving charges, saying it wasn’t him behind the wheel. My partner and I, along with the two cops, were pulled in to give our stories. The dude got off on a technicality. When my partner took away his keys, he took away the dude’s rights to leave.
He’d detained the idiot without reading him any sort of rights of detainment. Not a serious crime, but it seriously pissed the four of us off. And I’m obviously still cheesed about it thirty years later. I’m not in law enforcement, but I’m in a related field, and I saw a situation in which prosecutors had four main witnesses to a crime — drug trafficking, I think — and suddenly they all backed out and refused to testify against the guy.
Without their testimony, they were unable to convict him. Everyone knew the witnesses had been blackmailed, but no one could do anything about it. Something happened once when I was working in casino surveillance that really ate me up inside. As the story goes, we were very understaffed at the time — basically, I was working alone at 4 a.
m. on a Saturday night. I was watching two separate events on the CCTV. On two cameras, I had two males causing destruction of casino property, which was escalating quickly.
On another two cameras, I had two males being asked to leave the casino for being intoxicated. I was paying attention to both incidents, but I was far more focused on the damage to property, since the two males being escorted out weren’t showing any signs of aggression and basically left on their own accord. The two guys met what I thought was a third friend outside and went to get a taxi without any fuss at all. I say “friend” because they shook hands and appeared friendly toward each other.
The three guys walked toward the taxi rank, all buddy-buddy, so I focused back on the more important business. After a few seconds, I looked back at the three guys — and the third friend was lying in the middle of the road. I called in extra security and a medic straightaway. They got there in seconds to help the guy, but I couldn’t find the original two guys by that time.
All hell was breaking loose. No one knew where to look. I ran the footage and saw that security had run straight past the two guys as they got into a taxi and drove off. I did everything within my power to catch those two guys after that.
I was fixated for a long time because I felt that it might, in some way, redeem myself. But it was too late to matter. I worked as a border patrol guard for several years. Every day around 6 p.
m. , this young, fit gentleman would approach one of our lanes on his bicycle, wearing biker spandex and a big old backpack full of sand. Every day we’d ask him the nature of his visit, and he’d claim he was training with his cycling club across the border. Every day we’d sift the sand and look for anything he was smuggling.
A few times we even x-rayed the bike. We never found anything. This went on for the better part of four years. I met him in a bar after he’d stopped showing up, and as it happens, I wasn’t with the station anymore.
I asked him, man-to-man, what he was taking across the border. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Bicycles. ”
UK police here. Special constable — a police officer, but unpaid.
A man raped and attacked a woman after she told us a terrifying story that left me speechless. The things he did to her were unlike anything I have heard before, even on Reddit. He was a big bloke. Last time he was arrested, a large amount of force was used.
After we nicked him, we took him in for an interview, where of course he denied it. What happened next wasn’t official, but she had said he knew people who would sort her out. And all of a sudden, the next day, the case was dropped. We desperately tried to find an offense to protect this poor woman, but none was found.
The sad thing is, this happens all the time, and often we’re the ones who pick up the pieces after it’s too late. My heart goes out to all other officers and emergency service workers. It’s a tough job. I have a good friend who was beaten by her grandmother and molested by her grandfather.
She took it to court. He got off on a plea bargain. He raped and molested three young girls for, I think, about fourteen years, and all he gets is put on the sex offender registry. The grandmother got nothing as far as I’m aware.
We shouldn’t focus our system purely on punishment, but this monster is out in the public around children now. Note that I’m not an officer, and I’m afraid to reveal any more details about these cases because the people involved genuinely terrify me. Two people were charged for kicking and shooting a man with a pellet gun almost to death. The state was forced to dismiss charges because their witness didn’t appear.
Two men were charged with the murder of a girl. They tied her to a table and sawed her right foot off. Then they started on her left foot. The saw broke.
They killed her and dismembered her body, leaving the pieces in a bag behind a grocery store. Charges were dismissed by the state for lack of evidence. I will note, however, that in this case it’s very likely the state will try to refile. All of these people are currently walking the streets.
My dad is a major crimes investigator. He can usually get his criminals, but this one was a fourteen-year-old boy. I don’t remember what he did. They had him in custody, and my dad was interrogating him.
The first thing my dad did was read him his Miranda rights. For whatever reason, my dad decided it would be a good idea to break down the Miranda rights so the kid could understand them better — probably so he wouldn’t feel he’d coerced a confession when the kid had no idea. The kid continued to give a full confession. Well, that kind of backfired, because when they got to court, the kid’s lawyer got the entire confession thrown out, saying the kid did not understand his rights and that, based on the way my dad phrased it, the kid thought if he admitted it, my dad would write it down on his clipboard and it would never come back to bite him in the ass.
I guarantee that wasn’t true. The kid just admitted to it and then realized he’d made a huge mistake. The court threw out the confession, and the kid got away with it. My dad was pissed.
TL;DR: don’t be nice to criminals, even young ones. My father was in CSI, and the biggest murder that hit our town in years happened when I was in third or fourth grade. The first time they went to trial, the suspect was found guilty, due in part to my dad’s work. But somehow the defense attorneys found out that the prosecution had hidden some details that could have caused a not-guilty ruling.
It went to trial again. When the second trial happened, probably three or four years later, my father had to return and give his testimony, and it ended in a hung jury. The third trial didn’t happen until I was a senior in high school, and this time they found him not guilty. I’ve never asked my dad about it, but my mom says that while he never said it outright, it always disappointed him.
After the fact, there were a bunch of true crime shows made about the case. It’s weird seeing a show about a case your father worked on. This’ll get buried, but here goes. I used to be an RA at my university, and one night while I was on duty, some jackass got arrested, and I had to go to court to testify about said incident, which is unrelated to the rest of the story.
While we were waiting for the court to open, my boss, the other RA on duty with me, and the campus police officer involved were making small talk. We asked him if he ever went to the sentencing of cases he was involved with. The officer said he stopped going after a guy he had pulled off of a girl he was raping got off scot-free. Gotta keep a few details fuzzy, but here goes.
So this guy picks up a hitchhiker in a rural area. Unfortunately for her, she’d fallen on some hard times and didn’t particularly want to be found, which goes some way toward explaining why nobody noticed when he kidnapped her and kept her as his slave for several days. Eventually she manages to escape and contacts police, but he never comes back to the house. Finally, he’s tracked down in a larger city some distance away.
He’s brought in, and a search of his house in this city reveals a disturbingly clean basement with some indication that there had been shackles installed on the wall previously, but no forensic evidence. There was also a very large blowtorch sitting in the center of the room. He’s brought in, and his name is cross-checked against various databases. And lo and behold, it turns out he was caught in Europe after almost exactly the same thing happened — right down to the blowtorch in the basement.
Their case had gotten screwed somehow, and he’d just been deported back here. Thanks for the warning. He made some admissions regarding the European events, but nothing that was particularly useful here.
In fact, the only thing his admission really achieved was assuring that we were absolutely certain the serial killer was doing a very, very light stretch.