Random Completely Bizarre True Crime Stories (14 items)

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  (#1) Serial Killer Rodney Alcala Was A Contestant On 'The Dating Game' - And Won

  In 2010, police arrested Rodney Alcala, a professional photographer, and brought him to trial for an incredibly expansive list of crimes. By the time prosecutors had tallied up all of his potential victims, they discovered that Alcala had raped and possibly murdered over 100 women and children between 1978 until his capture. During the investigation, police uncovered photographs of potential victims and continued to charge Alcala as the identities of victims were confirmed - even after he was sentenced to death in his 2010 trial.

  The weirdest bit of Alcala’s crime spree, though, was his 1978 appearance as a bachelor on The Dating Game, which he won.
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  (#14) Serial Killers Fred And Rosemary West Kept Company With Another Criminal Couple

  Throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Gloucester, England, Fred and Rosemary West used their local pub, Prince Albert, as a means to lure young women back to their house. While Rosemary ran a successful prostitution ring, Fred imprisoned women, some of which who appeared as the Wests' lodgers at 25 Cromwell Street. Fred was later charged for the murder of a dozen women but took his own life while awaiting trial. Rosemary was convicted for the death of her daughter Heather, among others. 

  Even more shocking, the Wests' friends and owners of Prince Albert, David and Pauline Williams, were also arrested for running their own child sex ring. Investigators believe there's a connection between the criminal activities of the Wests and the Williams.
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  (#4) Issei Sagawa Might Be The World’s Most Horrendous Case of 'Affluenza'

  In June 1981, Japanese citizen Issei Sagawa was caught in a Parisian park with two suitcases in his hands. Inside the suitcases were the remains of Renée Hartevelt. Three days before he was caught, Sagawa had shot and killed Hartevelt and then spent the intervening time eating various parts of her body. For his crime, the affluent Sagawa spent five years in a psychiatric hospital, after which time he was able to check himself out and return to his native Japan.

  Over the 30 years since his crime, Sagawa has not only enjoyed freedom, he’s become something of a minor celebrity, essentially crafting his own cottage industry from his notorious reputation. Everything from manga to paintings to macabre re-enactments - in which Sagawa plays himself - have been created in the wake of his crimes. Sagawa is notoriously known as the "Celebrity Cannibal."
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  (#9) A Con Man Used Masonic Paranoia To Strip An Aristocrat Of Her Family Fortune

  In the age of the Internet, it may be hard to believe that hucksters and confidence men can still run a good game. Con artist Thierry Tilly made more than £4.3 million off the gullibility of a French aristocrat. According to the former wealthy Christine de Védrines, Tilly convinced her - and 10 members of her family - that she was the target of a vast conspiracy perpetrated by an evil cabal composed of various entities, including other members of her own family.

  Tilly encited them to increasingly paranoid behavior, to the point that the group was barricading itself behind the doors of its ancestral home, Chateau Martel. Over the course of a decade, from 1999 to 2009, Tilly reportedly siphoned the Védrines' vast fortune into offshore accounts and even made off with the family’s historic jewels. He’s now serving 10 years in prison for extortion and imprisonment, and Christine de Védrines and her family are completely broke.
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  (#12) Mother And Daughter Stacy Peterson And Christie Cales Both Went Missing

  In 2007, Stacy Peterson went missing from her home in Bolingbrook, Illinois. Eventually, the blame fell (rightly) on her husband, Drew Peterson. While there wasn’t quite enough evidence to convict Peterson - a former police sergeant - of Stacy’s murder, the attention the case received actually dredged up the circumstances surrounding the death of Peterson’s third wife, Kathleen Savio.

  The renewed investigation found enough evidence to finally put Peterson behind bars. He subsequently confessed to his fourth wife’s murder, as well. The kicker, though, is that nine years before Stacy’s disappearance, her mother, Christie Cales, also went missing under similarly mysterious - and still unsolved - circumstances.
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  (#11) Bernie Tiede Was The Murderer People Couldn’t Help But Love

  As of 2016, former mortician Bernie Tiede is in a Texas lockup for the 1996 murder of Marjorie Nugent, a well-to-do widow whom Bernie shot to death before hiding her body in her freezer for several months. Perhaps the strangest bit of this story is that in the wake of Nugent’s disappearance, no one seemed to care. Thanks to her reputation for being somewhat of a curmudgeon, her disappearance drew no concern.

  Reportedly, Tiede was in a relationship with Nugent, who was 40 years older than him. When Tiede’s crime was eventually discovered, the small-town characters surrounding the mortician actively fought against his incarceration, calling Tiede infallibly generous - possibly because he spent a lot of Nugent's $6 million fortune on various gifts to the town. Few people could believe the sweet-natured man could possibly have committed such a crime, even after he confessed to the "sweetheart scam."

  Jack Black portrayed Tiede in the 2011 movie Bernie. Although Tiede was actually convicted in 1999 and sentenced to life, he was released in 2014 pending a second trial. In 2016, his original sentence of 99 years was reinstated.

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