Jean

The most disturbing and unbelievable stories of the century

[Jean @jeanxbtt]

For months, a 13-year-old boy in Ohio searched “how to find the perfect victim” and “how to strangle someone.” In February 2025, he walked into his 64-year-old neighbor’s house in the middle of the night and strangled her in her bed. She fought back and tore out a chunk of his hair. His blood was all over the scene, and it should have been over right there. But the DNA matched two boys: him and his identical twin, and the lab couldn’t tell them apart.

In the video below, police put both twins in the back of the same cruiser.

“I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Neither do I.”

“Maybe it’s an intimidation tactic,” one of them says. One of these two boys did it.

Then detectives showed his brother a photo of a men’s watch that had been found under her body. He recognized it instantly. It was his twin’s. He put his head in his hands: “There’s no way. There has to be someone who planted evidence.”

It got worse. When police first came to the house, one twin had scratches on his face, and their mom blamed the cat. He’d been asking ChatGPT how to beat a police interrogation. The day after the murder, he posted: “This one was a fighter.”

Five days after the killing, their parents asked a court to let both boys move with their mom to California. Five days later, he was arrested. He pleaded guilty to aggravated murder. He’ll be released at 21.

Will he walk out at 21 a different person, or is this just who he is?

[Jean @jeanxbtt]

John Martorano killed 20 people for Boston's Winter Hill Gang. The government let him out after 12 years and handed him $20,000 to start a new life.

In January 2008, not long after he walked free, he sat down with 60 Minutes, and Steve Kroft asked him:

"Did you keep count of how many people you killed?" In the video below, he answers like he's talking about an old job: "A lot. Too many." Did he always shoot them? "I think I stabbed one guy." And when Kroft brings up the words serial killer, he says, "I might be a vigilante, but not a serial killer… I never enjoyed it."

He was the gang's chief executioner, working alongside Whitey Bulger. Two of his victims were teenagers, 17 and 19. Another man was shot because Martorano mistook him for someone else.

He hid in Florida for 16 years. When he was finally arrested in 1995, he learned that Bulger and Stevie Flemmi had helped the authorities find him. So he made a deal: confess to every murder and testify against them.

He got 12 years, a little more than seven months for each life he took. He turned down witness protection and went home to Boston.

12 years for 20 murders, because he helped bring down someone worse. Was that a fair deal?

[Jean @jeanxbtt]

On February 25, 1994, a father in England smiled into a police camera while detectives dug up his 16-year-old daughter in his own back garden. For almost seven years, Fred West had told his other children they would "end up under the patio like Heather" if they misbehaved, and then burst out laughing. That night, inside a police tent in Gloucester, a detective switched on a camcorder and asked him:

"Where's the location, Fred, that you buried her?" In the video below, he doesn't hesitate. He walks them to a corner of the tent and points, police mark the spot in red, and he turns to the camera and smiles. 49 minutes later an officer speaks into the tape: "This is 19:52, and the boys have found something."

That morning Fred had confessed. Only Heather, he said, strangled in a rage, and his wife Rose knew nothing. Then the diggers found a thigh bone where Fred had told them not to dig. Heather was in the spot he had shown them. The bone was not. Over the next two weeks police pulled nine bodies out of the cellar and garden of 25 Cromwell Street, and three more turned up at the couple's old home and in nearby fields. The youngest was Fred's 8-year-old stepdaughter.

Fred never stood trial. He hanged himself in his cell on New Year's Day 1995. Rose was convicted of 10 murders and will never leave prison.

In 2021, police dug up the cellar of a Gloucester café, searching for a 15-year-old girl who vanished in 1968 and has long been suspected as one more of Fred's victims. They found nothing. She is still missing.

Fred swore Rose knew nothing about Heather. Do you believe him?

[Jean @jeanxbtt]

On November 7, 2000, a gang in gas masks rammed a JCB digger through the wall of London's Millennium Dome to grab a £200 million diamond, one of the largest flawless stones in the world.

They got within 12 inches of it. What they didn't know was who the cleaners were:

Armed police. Officers had been posing as Dome staff and cleaners with guns under their uniforms, and 20 more in tactical gear were waiting behind a false wall in the vault. The diamond behind the glass was a fake. Scotland Yard had swapped every stone for a replica.

In the video below, the security cameras catch all of it. The digger smashes through the gate, smoke bombs go off, and one raider fires a nail gun into glass that was supposed to hold out for half an hour, then finishes it with a sledgehammer. Then about 200 officers move in.

Police had been watching them for months, ever since two botched armored van robberies led detectives to farms in Kent. Every time the gang called off an attempt, it was on a high-tide day, because the getaway was a speedboat on the Thames, bought for £3,700 cash under the name "T. Diamond." That's how police worked out which day they would come.

"I was 12 inches from pay day," Robert Adams, the man with the sledgehammer, told officers. "It would have been a blinding Christmas." He got 15 years. The two ringleaders got 18. The judge called it "a wicked plan."

So were they stupid, or just unlucky?

[Jean @jeanxbtt]

In 1972, a man once questioned about a double murder went on a TV game show where celebrities had to pick him out of three strangers.

All three said, "My name is Ed Edwards." Five years later, the real one shot a young couple in an Ohio park. Look at the three men in the video below and choose before you scroll. Which one is the killer?

Number three. The smiling man on the right. One panelist even voted for him because "number three, you trust with your life."

In the video below, the host reads Edwards' own story: once on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, "sought for questioning about a double murder," and "now I am a respected citizen in my community." He was there to sell his book, Metamorphosis of a Criminal. Then the host asks the real Ed Edwards to stand up, and number three stands, grinning.

The couple was Billy Lavaco, 21, and Judith Straub, 18, shot at close range in 1977. In 1980, Edwards was a handyman at a Wisconsin dance hall when Tim Hack and Kelly Drew vanished from a wedding reception there. Their bodies turned up in the woods weeks later. Edwards moved his family out of town almost overnight. In 1996, he shot his own foster son for $250,000 in life insurance.

It took 29 years. In 2009, his daughter April, who still remembered that sudden move when she was 11, read about the reopened case and recognized the dance hall. "I was shaking," she said, "because immediately I knew who it was." DNA on Kelly's clothes matched. He was arrested at 76, confessed, and wrote to prosecutors: "You're gonna want to put a needle in my arm." He got the death penalty in March 2011 and died in his cell a month later.

So be honest. Which one did you pick before you scrolled?

[Jean @jeanxbtt]

In 2017, a stranger on Twitter started answering young women who wrote that they wanted to die. He told them he could help, or that he would die with them. Eight of them came to his apartment outside Tokyo. So did a ninth person, a 20-year-old man who was looking for one of them. That fall police opened the door and found all nine still inside:

Takahiro Shiraishi, 26, recruited women for brothels in Tokyo's red-light district. Between August 22 and October 17 he killed all nine in his small apartment in Zama. The youngest was 15. He later said he did it for sex and money. Neighbors had complained about the smell.

He was caught because one victim's brother wouldn't stop looking for her. He went to police, and a woman set up a fake meeting with Shiraishi. On October 31, officers found the bodies hidden in three cooler boxes and five storage boxes.

In the video below, dozens of photographers are waiting outside the police station. A van rolls out through the cameras, and in the back seat Shiraishi, 27, hides his face in both hands.

At trial in 2020, his own lawyers argued the victims had agreed to die. He didn't back them. He pleaded guilty to all nine murders, was sentenced to death and refused to appeal. On June 27, 2025, Japan hanged him at 34, its first execution in almost three years.

Nine people told a stranger online they wanted to die, and he answered every one of them. Does the platform share any of the blame, or is this on him alone?

[Jean @jeanxbtt]

On November 3, 2016, deputies spent 15 minutes trying to break into a shipping container on land owned by one of South Carolina's top-selling real estate agents. It had five locks, and somebody had already bragged on Amazon about putting five locks on a shipping container. Then a deputy knocked on the side, and something inside knocked back:

Kala Brown, 30, had been chained in there for 64 days. In August she and her boyfriend, Charlie Carver, had gone to clear brush on the property of that realtor, Todd Kohlhepp. He was also a registered sex offender. At 15 he had kidnapped a 14-year-old girl at gunpoint in Arizona, served 14 years, then lied about it to get his real estate license. Kala's phone records led police to his land.

In the video below, a sergeant describes the locks and the knocking, then you see phone footage from inside. Kala is sitting there in chains, and when deputies ask about Charlie, she says, "He shot him." Asked who, she names Kohlhepp.

Charlie was buried on the property. Kala told police Kohlhepp had also bragged about walking into a motorcycle shop years earlier and shooting four people. That was the Superbike Motorsports massacre in Chesnee on November 6, 2003: the owner, his mother, his service manager and a mechanic, all shot dead, unsolved for 13 years. He also led investigators to the graves of Johnny and Meagan Coxie, a young couple he had hired to work on his land in 2015.

Then reporters found Amazon reviews tied to a wish list in his name. A padlock: "solid locks.. have 5 on a shipping container.." A folding shovel: "keep in car for when you have to hide the bodies." In May 2017 he pleaded guilty to seven murders and got seven consecutive life sentences instead of a death penalty trial.

Was that deal justice for the families, or should South Carolina have gone for the death penalty?

[Jean @jeanxbtt]

In 1987, Jimmy Swaggart went on Larry King Live and called a rival TV preacher caught in a sex scandal “a cancer in the body of Christ.” The next year, a private detective’s camera caught Swaggart himself.

Swaggart was Jerry Lee Lewis’s cousin, and his ministry made an estimated $142 million in 1986. In 1986 he also exposed another preacher, Marvin Gorman, for having an affair. Gorman left the ministry.

Gorman wanted revenge. He hired a detective, who photographed Swaggart at a motel outside New Orleans with a prostitute named Debra Murphree. She later said he paid her to pose nude.

On February 21, 1988, he stood in front of about 7,000 people at his own church in Baton Rouge. He never said what he had done.

In the video below, his face twists as he looks up and says, “I have sinned against you, my Lord.” He asks for every stain to be washed away “until it is in the seas of God’s forgetfulness.”

His church ordered him out of the pulpit for a year. He refused and was defrocked. He later paid Gorman $1.8 million to settle a lawsuit.

In 1991, police in California pulled him over for driving on the wrong side of the road. The woman in his Jaguar said she was a prostitute. This time there were no tears. He told his church, “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.”

He died in July 2025, at 90. Netflix’s documentary on the TV preacher scandals comes out November 20.

So were the tears in 1988 real, or did he just know what 7,000 people and a TV camera needed to see?

[Jean @jeanxbtt]

In July 2025, before a deal could save him from execution for killing four Idaho college students, a judge asked Bryan Kohberger one question on camera. He answered with one word.

A year later, in a letter he wrote by hand from prison, he said that word was a lie. And he asked for the one thing the deal had saved him from.

Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin were killed in their rental house in Moscow, Idaho, on November 13, 2022. The killer left a knife sheath on the bed. Its DNA led to a criminology PhD student 9 miles away, through a Q-tip from his parents' trash.

He faced the death penalty. Weeks before trial, he took a deal: guilty on all counts, life without parole, no appeal.

In the video below, he sits still between his lawyers as the judge goes down a list. Has anyone promised you anything? Threatened you? Told you to be untruthful today? "No," every time. Then the one that mattered: "Are you pleading guilty because you are guilty?" "Yes."

At sentencing, asked if he wanted to speak, he said, "I respectfully decline."

In July he filed a handwritten petition saying he's innocent. He says his lawyers told him the plea didn't have to be true, promised him visits, a job and freedom to move around in prison, and never told him about hair in Ethan's hand that was never DNA tested. And he says the state is welcome to seek the death penalty again.

His new lawyer now wants the judge removed, partly because the judge reportedly cried at sentencing. Kaylee's father says he'd love a trial.

He said "No" on camera to every promise he now says he was given. So should Idaho give him the trial he wants, death penalty and all, or hold him to his word?

[Darvin @darvinxq]

Dorothea Puente was a sweet 59-year-old grandmother who ran a boarding house for the poor and the elderly in Sacramento. In November 1988, police dug up her rose garden and found a body. They sat her down in an interrogation room and asked her one simple question: “Are there any other bodies?” She looked the detective in the eye and said no. There were six more.

In the video below, you can see the real 1988 interrogation tape that was later played to the jury.

Social workers sent her their hardest cases: homeless, elderly, mentally ill, people nobody would come looking for. She cooked for them and looked after them. And she had their Social Security checks sent to her house.

It all fell apart because of one social worker who couldn’t find a tenant named Alvaro Montoya. Puente’s story kept changing. When police showed up, she smiled and said: sure, dig wherever you want. Thirty minutes later, they hit human remains.

Now watch the tape. The detective tells her they found a body. She doesn’t ask who it is. She says it can’t be Alvaro, because he wouldn’t be “that decayed” yet. Then, without being asked, she names a second tenant.

She was on parole that day, for drugging and robbing elderly people. Before that, forged checks and running a brothel. But a record isn’t proof of murder, so police couldn’t arrest her. Hours later, she asked if she could go meet her nephew for tea at a hotel down the street. They let her go. She was on her way to Los Angeles.

Days later, she was drinking with a retiree at an LA bar. He recognized her from the TV news and called it in. Seven bodies came out of her yard. Prosecutors said she collected more than $87,000 from her tenants’ checks.

She got life for three murders and died in prison in 2011, at 82, still saying: “They don’t have all the facts.”

The police legally couldn’t hold her that day. Was letting her walk the law working, or the law failing?

[Jean @jeanxbtt]

@darvinxq the fact that a third personality appeared right after the psychiatrist mentioned it says a lot about how carefully he was playing the experts

[Jean @jeanxbtt]

@veraxlab $146 might seem small today, but giving millions of kids a stake in a private space company is a pretty interesting idea

[Darvin @darvinxq]

Jerry Buss’s stepfather refused to adopt him. Decades later, buying the Los Angeles Lakers meant he had to own the Chrysler Building for about five minutes. It all started with $83.33 a month.

In the video below, his daughter Jeanie tells the story.

Buss grew up poor during the Depression. His mother worked days, went on dates at night, and locked him in the house alone. When she remarried, her new husband wouldn’t adopt him. He was the only Buss in a family of Browns.

As a young scientist, he and a coworker put aside $83.33 a month each until they had $1,000. They bought their first apartment building and did the handyman work themselves. The rent covered the costs, so they did it again. And again.

By the ’70s he had a real estate empire in Southern California. He spent two years chasing Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke, flying to Vegas, where Cooke was living to get through what was then the biggest divorce settlement in history.

The deal was a pile of land swaps. At one point Cooke wanted the Chrysler Building, so Buss got it through other deals and handed it over. He owned it for about five minutes.

In 1979 he paid $67.5 million for the Lakers, the Kings, the Forum and a ranch. His Lakers won 10 titles. In 2025, his kids sold control of the team at a $10 billion valuation.

It started with $83.33 a month. What’s yours doing right now?

[Verax @veraxlab]

In December 2007, Warren Buffett bet $500,000 that a plain S&P 500 index fund would beat five hedge fund portfolios picked by professionals over ten years. In 2008, the first year, every one of the five beat the index.

So by the end of 2017, how far ahead did the professionals finish? Answer before you scroll.

They finished behind, all five of them. The index fund gained 125.8%, the best portfolio gained 87.7% and the average was 36.3%. Buffett's charity, Girls Inc. of Omaha, received $2,222,279.

Table 1 in the document lists every year for all six. As a group the funds trailed the index in each of the nine years after 2008, and Fig. 1 shows $1 million turning into $2.26 million in the index versus $1.36 million in the average fund.

Buffett's explanation was fees. In his own letter he estimated fixed fees at about 2.5% of assets a year, paid whether the funds won or lost.

Table 2 runs the same fee on $500 a month for 30 years at 8% before fees. At 1% you finish with about $585,000, at 0.05% with about $698,000. Moving to a low-cost index fund keeps roughly $113,000.

What's the annual fee on the fund your retirement money is sitting in right now?

[Darvin @darvinxq]

Bob Costas was 18 when his father dropped dead at JFK airport. At the wake, a man handed him a thick envelope with $6,000 in $100 bills. It was everything his father left behind, and a bookie would never have paid it to a dead man.

In the video below, he tells the story himself.

His father, John, was a big-time gambler. Not casinos, not racetracks. Ball games. Bob says the mortgage was literally riding on his bets.

When the games went the wrong way, he threw things, cursed and yelled. Bob’s mom and sister would leave. Bob stayed, because watching the games with his dad was the only way to be close to him.

Friday, May 15, 1970. A cop knocks on the door. Before he says a word, Bob’s mother asks, “My husband’s dead, isn’t he?” John Costas had a heart attack walking through JFK. He was 42.

At the wake, one of his gambling buddies walked in with the envelope. “Your father was up when he died. Give this to your mother.” A bookie never pays a dead man, so the friend went to the bookie himself and said John sent him to collect.

Decades later, Bob Costas refused to read sports betting ads on air. Today the bookie lives in everyone’s phone. Is that progress?