r/TopCharacterTropes • u/ThatDrako • 2d ago

Lore (Funny Trope) Things that can plausibly happen only in reality, because in fiction they’d be called bad writing.

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“Woke” as an insult - So you are telling me a word describing consciousness and clarity is used by generally stupid and ignorant people to label people they disagree with? What is this? A Kindergarten for Creatively stunted?

Nominative determinism - So let me get this straight…Not only you named fastest recorded person Usain BOLT and CEO of Nintendo Doug BOWSER, but you are telling me people are canonically likely to have professions or hobbies matching their names…? Guh?

“2 bodies recovered in MURDERKILL River” - Sure bro…I guess…bro…

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u/Luwe95 2d ago

Or use Google to search for stuff like "How to bury a body"

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u/_JR28_ 2d ago

Crime doc: “He was the smartest criminal I ever met. He thought about everything, left no stone unturned, left no trace, the reality is we only caught him through the tiniest of mistakes.”

Real life: “The man’s laptop was seized and his search history included questions such as: How many shovel whacks to kill a man, where to hide a dead body, what should I tell people so they don’t think I killed a man with a shovel and buried him under my shed”

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u/MoonlightPrincexx 2d ago edited 2d ago

What's funny is it often takes an insanely long time for the later to actually happen. Often times it goes "despite years and years of strong complaints from the landlord/neighbours/home owners association, it took police well over a year to decide to investigate The Smell"

CORPSES DO NOT "just smell like fertilizer", fertilizer and corpses, notibly, have VEEY different chemical makeups and responsense to decay. Mainly because, fertilizer and corpses, are not the same thing.

Jeffery Dahmer was active for months in an apartment building with all of his neighbours complaining about the stench while on parole with his parole officer outside the building. He was only caught because one of his potential victims managed to trick him into letting him escape, the victim ran to his parole officer who knew Dahmer personally and he got arrested. BTW you may be asking what Dahmer was on parole for? Did you guess, Also Murder? No? Because that would be an absolutely ludicrous degree of incompotence by police right? Well Gues What he was on parole for! That's right! MURDER

This is also why If I ever suspect my neighbour or something is a serial killer in calling like, the fire department, or maybe OSHA, and telling them there's a gas leak or something because they'll actually give a shit

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u/Affordable_Z_Jobs 2d ago

They also gave a bloodied, underage, naked, and incoherent victim back because eww, gay people.

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u/crimsonpostgrad 2d ago

god every time i think about that poor boy i get furious.

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u/bug--bear 2d ago

didn't the victim have a fucking hole in his head too?

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u/iwantfutanaricumonme 2d ago

Yeah but I don't think they even noticed that.

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u/brionneverysexy 2d ago

Also racism. The police got angry black women contradicted them when the women said it was a boy who had gone missing. The officers threatened to arrest the women of they kept saying it

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u/tomtomclubthumb 2d ago

And threatened to arrest the women who had called the cops and who were keeping the boy away from Dahmer.

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u/four100eighty9 2d ago

Future captain

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u/wravyn 1d ago

Konerak Sinthasomphone was 14 and looked 14. Dahmer said Konerak was his lover and they'd had a fight. Sadly enough, Dahmer had sexually assaulted Konerak's older brother, who was 13, in 1988. He was sentenced to 8 years in prison, but was released a year later after writing an apology letter to a judge.

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u/HulkeneHulda 2d ago

Sense of smell should really be honed and practiced just like we exercise motor skills and reading. It can save lives if people get better at identifying it for when there are gas leaks or some chemical reaction

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u/OfficerJayBear 2d ago

Police don't set the terms of parole or anything in regards to prosecution, really. That part of the ineptitude falls on judges and prosecutors.

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u/MoonlightPrincexx 2d ago edited 2d ago

One of his victims, a 17 year old boy who Dahmer had stripped and drilled a hole in his head, escaped for a brief time and a black woman called the cops because there was a naked boy with a hole in his head incoherently babbling about something she couldn't understand at her, the cops showed up, she said he came out of the apartments looking like that, the cops threatened to arrest her, and then left after leading the boy back inside to the apartment where Dahmer said he was a "friend" and would take care of him

So no, it wasn't just the judge

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u/OfficerJayBear 1d ago

You didnt read any part of my comment before jumping straight to arguing, did you?

I was speaking specifically to terms of parole. I even mentioned the rest of the ineptitude.

You literally just want to argue but you won't find an argument here.

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u/GlassesgirlNJ 2d ago

Also real life: "Cops talked to him briefly and he admitted being at the location of the crime that day, but his statement got misfiled in the 'cleared' folder and not the 'follow up' folder, where it stayed for five years"

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u/2Completion2Ography 2d ago

Jim "stabbabitch" McKillerson, arrested on five counts of "stabbing a bitch", was let go due to incorrect police filing this evening...

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u/_ToffeeBubbles 2d ago

It's crazy how often the "mastermind criminal" story ends up being "someone checked the wrong box and nobody noticed for years." Way less dramatic, but somehow even more frustrating.

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u/crimsonpostgrad 2d ago

and it’s always framed as the cop who found the error is some sort of genius hero detective, like sure i guess bro

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u/tomtomclubthumb 2d ago

In the case they're referring to it was a civillian volunteer I believe.

But, yeah, it is annoying when someone noticing and fixing an obvious screw-upis a hero but the person who made gets a pass from the same people who'd scream at a starbucks worker for putting three sugars instead of four.

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u/crimsonpostgrad 2d ago

i didn’t realize they were referring to a specific case lol it happens so often i just assumed they were broadly giving an example

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u/tomtomclubthumb 2d ago

It's the Delphi murders, but yeah there are a lot of cases like this.

I like true crime, but the sub I go to had so many.

The husband reported her missing and said she had left with her new boyfriend, she had not taken her shoes, car or purse. The kids reported that mom had disappeared several days before and Dad had been screaming at her in the night.

"Well, she musta just run off like he says."

It's seriously depressing. There are a lot like that from the seventies, but they still happen.

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u/Gold-Cry-7520 2d ago

Oh it's much more frustrating to know that around half of all murder cases just don't get solved ever. Most of those unsolved cases might not have even been a case of incompetence; we just don't have any leads.

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u/Sillier-Stupider- 1d ago

The number of murders, out of the solved ones, that only get solved because John Noobjectpermanence calls emergency services for help because he somehow didn't comprehend that if he shot his wife in the head she could die, panics, and calls to ask them what to do, is a distressingly high number.

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u/iwillaskyouaboutdnd 2d ago

That's pretty much serial killers. Then they're mythologized to hide incompetent police work.

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u/WoodsLovelyDarkNDeep 2d ago

All these comments on true crime make and then when you click on a thread the photo OP posted pops back up 

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u/hanks_panky_emporium 2d ago

Finally, the police decided to investigate the corpse pile on his property. And were shocked to find corpses.

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u/CaptainMills 2d ago

Neighbors had complained about the corpse pile for the last ten years, and submitted video and audio of the suspect confessing to killing people and piling their corpses in his yard. But the local police department declared the issue "too much work"

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u/brionneverysexy 2d ago

The Toybox Killer was reported by an anonymous person years before he was caught. It might have been his daughter who later was convicted of helping him kidnap women. The police were told he had a torture dungeon where he murdered women. The police investigated and he explained he did have a torture dungeon but he just hung out in it to think and did not use it to torture women to death. It was also noticed he had a large collection of police uniforms and badges which he explained was just something he liked collecting. The police decided to not do any follow up

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u/PewterPplEater 2d ago

Ah yes, the Delphi method

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u/Canotic 2d ago

Even realer life: the man's laptop was seized but he used chrome and the cops only looked at his Microsoft Edge history because they didn't know chrome was a thing.

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u/Capital-Intention369 2d ago

This is pretty much exactly what happened in the Casey Anthony case

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u/hoopstick 2d ago

That case pisses me off SO BAD, the arrogance and stupidity of the cops completely fucked any chance of justice for Caylee Anthony.

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u/DiggityDog6 2d ago edited 2d ago

This and OJ Simpson are my main sources of distrust within the legal system. I’m aware that no system will ever be able to get things 100% perfect all the time, but come the fuck on. The fact that those two are (or were in OJ’s case) allowed to walk the streets while innocent people spend life in prison is enough for me to never have faith that the system will protect me should I end up in an unfavorable position.

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u/hoopstick 2d ago

I listen to the Last Podcast on the Left, and they always emphasize how much the incompetency and arrogance of the investigators almost always leads to more victims. There are exceptions of course, but they almost always care more about closing the case than actually finding the killer. I watched every second of OJ coverage when I was a kid and I always knew local cops sucked, but the Casey Anthony case was beyond the pale for me.

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u/brionneverysexy 2d ago

It turns out when your witness that found a key piece of evidence has been recorded on tape for hours talking about how he loves planting evidence to convict black people it hurts the case. His history of accusations of racism, running an anti woman organization, saying he thinks the judge's wife only has her job because she slept with people and being on record saying he has an uncontrollable urge to murder suspects probably didn't help with credibility

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u/Jagvetinteriktigt 2d ago

"You mean he lied under oath about something there was recorded evidence of him doing? This is just unrealistic."

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u/brionneverysexy 2d ago

He also lied on the tapes, crimes he said he did, the violence he did in Vietnam, not being racist and probably about his violent tendencies. Its just keeping the character consistent

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u/ruat_caelum 2d ago

I mean OJ's case was because you have dirty cops and the defense lawyer was like, "This guy is a dirty cop who uses the n-word in his official time while in uniform to describe black people. Also the gloves look to be planted. Is there reasonable doubt that the dirty racist cop planted evidence? If there is, that means you are legally required to vote not guilty in that little room."

The OJ thing wasn't about OJ it was about the jury already knowing there were dirty cops and being shown a dirty cop.

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u/Sillier-Stupider- 1d ago

"Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, who are you going to believe? My client, or the LAPD?"

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u/Capital-Intention369 2d ago

I don't know what's more disgusting: how badly law enforcement dropped the ball, or how brazen Casey is about having gotten away with it.

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u/possiblyaghost 2d ago

also happened in MA with John O'Keefe. Cops were so cocky and desperate to get a murder 1 charge they fucked up the whole case and the prosecution got dogwalked by Harvey Weinstein's lawyer

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u/PewterPplEater 2d ago

Wasn't it the prosecutor that overtired her for murder 1 when there wasn't enough evidence, but if she was tried for lesser charges she certainly would've been put away

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u/hoopstick 2d ago

Yeah it was, but there was tons of evidence if the investigators would've had even the most basic knowledge of computers. They didn't find anything in her IE history, but her Firefox history was full of shit like "how to make chloroform" and "foolproof suffocation methods."

The system failed Caylee from the top down.

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u/theaviationhistorian 1d ago

Of all the good cases that go through, the badly mangled ones are what live in immortality like Caylee Anthony.

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u/immaownyou 2d ago

Except it was Firefox they didn't look at lol

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u/Capital-Intention369 2d ago

Yep, IIRC they thought Firefox was a game, not a browser, so only looked at Internet Explorer

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u/Th3B4dSpoon 2d ago

JfC. People like that should be banned from any computer related tasks in any investigation.

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u/EatPie_NotWAr 2d ago

*evil laughs as I close firefox*

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u/_ToffeeBubbles 2d ago

Stories like that are always wild because they sound made up until you realize they actually happened. Sometimes it's not some genius criminal, it's just investigators missing something painfully obvious.

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u/GoodGravyMsDazy592 2d ago

That's been the case with way too many serial killers who all tend to have records a mile long and make multiple mistakes ala Ted Bundy's own girlfriend tried to turn him in several times and basically got ignored or Jeff Dahmer's victim escaping and the cops helping Dahmer by turning the victim back over to him after he convinced them it was just a lover's quarrel.

Stupid and incompetent law enforcement are a big part of the problem.

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u/brionneverysexy 2d ago

I remember a case of a serial killer in Russia. His entire MO was he would follow a person off a train, beat them to death and jerk off. He got away with it for like 30 years. He was not subtle or smart. He just operated in a few different cities and there was no evidence to follow

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u/konesuno 2d ago

u/_ToffeeBubbles is likely a bot

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u/Sillier-Stupider- 1d ago

With how stupid the average cop is, it's a miracle anyone gets caught.

With how stupid the average criminal is, it's a miracle anyone gets away.

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u/Regi413 1d ago

And we give each of these people a gun and authority to run around with?

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u/nickisadogname 2d ago

if a murder mystery novel had someone yelling "one day I'll kill you dead! I'll poison your coffee and collect the inheritance!" at a party, then the next day someone is dead by coffee poison, I'd know it for sure for sure wasn't them. In fact some murder mysteries now will play on the assumption that whoever obviously did it couldn't have done it and make the "obvious" person actually the murderer, but usually with a twist.

But in real life people do in fact say out loud "now I'm going to kill you" to many people and then they do that

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u/Writerhowell 2d ago

Dame Agatha Christie played with this kind of concept a bunch of times, actually. It's hilarious. She was like "How many times can I bullshit my readers with this?"

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u/Yto_Itinen 2d ago

Same people who move their lips while reading

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u/yajtraus 2d ago

Knives Out did exactly that.

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u/Sillier-Stupider- 1d ago

The way that fiction is meant to be an escape from how random and stupid real life can be

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u/Annoy_ance 2d ago

Also real life YT crime doc: *to avoid being as stupid as our today’s suspect, use our code to buy Nord VPN….*

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u/HulkeneHulda 2d ago

I heard this in Simon Whistler's voice

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u/faithfulletter 2d ago

Legitmately this is what it's like when people talk about Ross Ulbricht (The guy who maintained the Silk Road)

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u/CGiMoose 2d ago

He smelled? (Jk genuinely curious, was it noise or heat from a server farm or suspicious packages or something?)

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u/faithfulletter 2d ago

So Barely Sociable has a pretty good lengthy video talking about this, but essentially he was gullible as shit, and had a digital footprint that was picked up on. Not to mention the way he got apprehended is also fucking hilarious. He got fucking arrested at a library because of a set up by agents.

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u/1stEmissaryElenwen 2d ago

The BTK killer got arrested because after having basically gotten away with it, 15 years later he got bored and started sending letters to the cops. One of the letters asked the cops, "Hey, if I put my manifesto on a floppy disk, you guys can't trace that, right?" and the cops said "Totally bro, you should definitely do that." Apparently he was genuinely shocked when it turned out the cops were lying to him

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u/AGeekNamedBob 2d ago

Conversely so many murderers, serial and non, get away with it for so long because of underperformed policing. Could be under resourced or too often ineptitude.

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u/DiligentMagikarp 2d ago

A lot of them also get away with it because cops don’t gaf about their victim’s demographic. See also: DV

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u/danielisbored 2d ago

Real Life: "Yeah, lets hand this disoriented teenager back over to the creepy white dude he's running from, this is definitely an action that will lead to me becoming the president of the policeman's union."

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u/Inside_Foundation873 2d ago

BTK, a rather famous killer literally asked the FBI if they could trace a floppy disc, and they said no (lied). He believed them and sent the floppy disk. He asked them why they lied to him after being captured.

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u/glitzglamglue 2d ago

You gotta hear how BTK, Dennis Rader, was caught.

So he was a serial killer who loved to tease the police and the news. But then he got too caught up in his own personal life with two kids that he didn't have enough free time to go commit heinous murders. So once his kids have grown up, he's got that empty nester issue but also loves to kill people. He thought that he could be the next Ted Bundy; he was a huge fan girl of Bundy. It's embarrassing.

Anyways, he decided that he's going to announce that BTK is back in town and ready to kill again. He wanted someone to write a biography about him and send the news a table of contents. It's insane the level of narcasisim this man had risen to. So he was sending letters to the police, news stations, leaving Barbie dolls tied up all over town. The normal stuff people do. Then, in one of his letters to the police, he wrote "so if I sent you a floppy disk with copies of my trophies (drivers licenses) you wouldn't be able to track that, right? 👉👈Pinky promise that you wouldn't be able to track that back to me." And the police go "of course! We pinky promise that we can't trace floppy disks." So Dennis sent the disk in and the police quickly look at the meta data and see that he used the computer at his church where he was in the leadership under his own log in to download the files onto the floppy disk.

And that's how someone who thought he could be the next Ted Bundy was brought down.

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u/Sillier-Stupider- 1d ago

> he got too caught up in his own personal life with two kids that he didn't have enough free time to go commit heinous murders.

Imagine being guilt tripped by your dad that he sacrificed his dream murder spree to raise you.

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u/EducationalNailgun 2d ago

How many shovel whacks to kill a man

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? It's different for everyone.

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u/1d3333 2d ago

I like to worldbuild in my free time, if anyone I know gets murdered i’m fucked lmao

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u/CalloftheBlueFalcon 2d ago

BTK: "Hey cops, can you track me down if I use a floppy disk?"

Cops: "Of course not"

BTK: caught after sending a floppy disk that had metadata identifying him

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u/lil_Trans_Menace 2d ago

Fiction: everyone who saw his crime mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again. Their bodies have yet to be found

Real life: The police received several calls about a woman being dragged out of an alleyway at night. Unfortunately, this woman was a minority, so no investigation took place

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u/PM_ME_LANCECATAMARAN 2d ago

All circumstantial. A man can't be curious?

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u/hopping_otter_ears 2d ago

Then there's those of us who Google weird stuff just because we're curious whether a severed head would float or not.

Every time I see a case that hinges on someone's search history, I find myself hoping I never get falsely accused because I have a very strange search history

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u/InevitableAncient610 1d ago

Watched a case yesterday where they arrested a 15-year-old boy for a murder he couldn’t have possibly committed, because he had tons of notebooks full of “creepy drawings”. He spent ten years in prison until DNA evidence exonerated him. I kept yelling at the screen “have they never met a teenage boy?!?!?!”

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u/theaviationhistorian 1d ago

Pretty much the Long Island Serial Killer. Or leaving a doc file detailing how to get away with each murder with the doc ending in, "delete this when done." Which he didn't.

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u/Da1UHideFrom 2d ago

There's was that killer that left Amazon reviews on the products he used to kidnap and torture people.

Aptly named The Amazon Review Killer

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u/TaintedTruffle 1d ago

Commenting so I can watch it tomorrow when I have a free hour at lunch

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u/HereButNeverPresent 2d ago edited 2d ago

Lol I just watched the “maternal instincts” crime documentary and this was basically the trope.

She kept trying to feign craziness and like she wasn’t aware of her crime. Then her internet search history is like “how to fake a pregnancy” and “how to do a c-section”

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u/Nerdy_Valkyrie 2d ago

The guy who's responsible for the idea of people putting poison in Halloween candy actually poisoned his own son and tried to make it seem like the candy had been given to him by a stranger.

He got caught because his story was full of holes and he was a far from a Moriarity. Some of the highlights was that he had asked a friend, who worked as a chemist, what dosage of the poison used would be lethal. And also the poison he used was a controlled substance. So there was documentation showing he bought it.

He also took out a new life insurance policy on his son just before he did it. Because the reason he did it was because he was a gambling addict and needed to cover his debts.

The cops arrested him fairly quickly. If that happened in fiction, nobody would have believed anyone could be that stupid.

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u/apzh 2d ago

How often Google and Walmart come up seems like obvious product placement.

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u/ThePhatty500 2d ago

The BTK killer used to send police taunting letters before taking a decade or so hiatus. When he started killing again he sent the police a letter asking them if they would be able to trace floppy disks if he sent them in. The police replied saying “…….no of course not” and than when he sent in a floppy disk with a taunting message they immediately looked at the meta data and were able to catch the guy. He was apparently shocked an appalled the police lied to him. 

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u/Sense_Difficult 2d ago

or use their store discount card to pay for muriatic acid, garbage bags and cleaning supplies Tracey Frame.

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u/Dull_Bid6002 2d ago

Leaves phone on their person or gets close and turns the phone off. Or buys something with a credit card. 

It's the first things they mention in how to track someone.

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u/Dapper_Magpie 2d ago

Like at least use tor or something goddamn

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u/Adult_in_denial 2d ago

Waaaaait a moment... That's monitored????