My rainy day craft box

I've said for years that Missouri is Kansas City on one side, St. Louis on the other, and several hundred miles of Twilight Zone in between. Although maybe that's not a good analogy because in the Twilight Zone the horrific happenings always have a moral and a point. Being something of a true crime aficionado I've been following a couple of really horrific cases that have broken within days of each other.

On one side we've got the fifteen year-old girl who butchered a nine year-old acquaintance to "see what it felt like."
http://www.newstribune.com/articles/2009/11/18/news_local/doc4b03e12d78cb3700623688.txt

And on the other we have Burrell Mohler, his brother, and four sons who make the murderous backwoods mutants from the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "Hills Have Eyes" films look like the family on "7th Heaven."
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/11/17/missouri.child.sexual.abuse/index.html

This one especially hits home for me since at the time of their arrests Burrell and most of his brood were living in Independence, which persistent readers will know is where I used to live. I wish I could say I'm surprised at their involvement in our local wacky religious cult who live in a giant twisted glass spire that supposedly contains a luxurious bedroom reserved for Jesus when He returns. But I'm not.

I would like to say that this is a nice region to live in; a really, really nice one. But I guess that's where you should always count on evil to rear its head most flagrantly.

[Error: unknown template qotd]Reading the answers, I had no idea so many people believe Kurt Cobain was murdered. Apparently Courtney Hole is a brilliant master criminal. Who knew? And the CIA secretly had Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison killed for their knowledge of the Agent Orange experiments conducted on American troops in Vietnam. And Paul McCartney was run over by a truck in the mid 1960's and has been portrayed by a sophisticated android ever since.

Oh there was a question, wasn't there? Being a true crime nut, I'll go with all the other true crime nuts who've been answering and say the Whitechappel Murders, a.k.a. Jack the Ripper. He was the first murderer I ever heard of thanks to me seeing the movie Time After Time on HBO one afternoon as a kid and he's stuck in my imagination ever since. Apparently he's stuck in a lot of other people's imaginations too. If every fictional portrayal of and conspiracy theory about Jack the Ripper were combined you would get a time-travelling cyborg vampire orangutan alien immortal Freemason who may or may not be an illegitmate heir to the British throne.

All the sensationalism can't diminish the reality of the case though. Several women who lived harsh lives in a harsh place died horrible, frightening deaths and the person who did it got away with it. Think the reason Jack the Ripper continues to fascinate people so much is that he wasn't just a serial killer, but an entire society seen in microcosm.

Growing up down the road from Wichita KS. I feel like I should be more interested in the BTK killings but I'm not. The killer, Dennis Rader, is certainly interesting from a psychological standpoint though.