“I was in line to check out and immediately noticed the man in front of me. The store was otherwise almost empty. He was youngish white guy, average build, maybe 30’s? He was hunched over, with a baseball cap bunched down over much of his face.

He purchased these items: a shovel, three pack of duct tape, rope, a set of zip ties, a box of latex gloves, a pair of leather gloves, an empty gas container (the red plastic kind), and a disposable cell phone (one of those “Trac Phone” type things). He seemed to be unwilling to engage with the checkout person (who also seemed annoyed to be working at 1 AM on a Tuesday - fair enough). He paid in cash.

The next day I called the local FBI field office and explained/reported the situation. The people taking the complaint asked me repeatedly if I was calling in response to a specific crime (uhh, creepiness?) but took my information.

I didn’t hear of anything or see anything on the news that caused alarm.

THEN

A few months later the FBI local office reached back out to me to ask if I paid with a credit card at Wal-Mart (I did).

I never heard from them again.”

“My parents knew Fred and Rosemary West. I stayed at their house when I was a kid. I never would have thought them capable of what they did.”

“Journalist at a local newspaper doing the Sunday evening shift. Got a call about a guy whose car had been hijacked with his 2 year old son in it. I met him at the police station to interview him, get a pic of the kid so we could publish and ask people to be on the lookout etc. The man was devastated. I’d been a journalist for years, traveled all over, I was no pushover and generally really good at reading people. This man was clearly in a state. I had a hard time staying professional and not bawling my eyes out in front of him.

At the end of the interview I clasped his hands tightly , trying to convey how awful I found his situation to be. I told him all I could do was write the best story possible. Maybe someone would read it, see the pic and help find the kid.

I didn’t sleep that night.

The next day (day off after weekend shift) one of my colleagues phoned me, they’d found the body of the little boy at a rubbish dump. And they’d arrested his father for the murder. He’d had issues with the boy’s mother so murdered his own son out of spite or something. I don’t know. I don’t want to know. He made up the story of the hijacking.

All I know is I shook the same hands that had killed a little boy. I cried for him while he just played me, knowing he’d killed his son just hours before.

That haunted me for years.”

“Freshman year of college, I was in a very small English class. It was a super small class so we got pretty comfortable with each other.

A couple months into the semester, a 10 -year old girl was kidnapped, and later found murdered. It was a major news story in Colorado. The biggest shock was finding out that the killer, Austin, was in my English class.

Before he was arrested, we had done a class review of people’s papers and my professor pulled my classmates essay up on the projector. It was odd though, because his papers were usually well-written but this was full of grammatical and spelling errors and fragmented ideas going nowhere. Austin told us he was sorry about all the mistakes and that the draft was rushed because he was busy and couldn’t focus. After he was arrested, a classmate realized that was a day or two after she was kidnapped and murdered.

One day, me and him had walked together to our cars and had a discussion about morality and religion. That conversation stuck with me a lot, especially when some more details of his life and what lead up to the murder came out.

I still get an icky feeling about it.

Edited for Clarity**** and yes it was the Jessica Ridgeway case.”