"Last I heard, he was still serving a life sentence."

I'm an Associate Editor on BuzzFeed's Pop Culture team who spends my days fangirling over all my favorite TV shows and movies.

Some stories are from this Reddit thread. Just a heads up: some of these stories can be quite gruesome. And some stories deal with topics like drug use, animal abuse, and suicide. 

"Fast forward a few years, and I am working in Manhattan, and I literally bump right into him on the subway platform. Apparently, he got out after a few years. It was seriously the most awkward small talk I ever had with someone in my life."

"I remember when I found out about Aurora, I was working when my old college roommate texted me asking if I had heard about the shooting in Colorado, followed shortly by her texting me who did it. My roommate remembered him clearly from a GE class we both took with him. I remember feeling scared, for some reason, when I put a name to a face. My teeth started chattering wildly. I was shocked.

It still freaks me out to this day, remembering working in labs and having class discussions with that guy. We were definitely not friends but, I probably saw him nearly every day for at least a couple years. I can still see him working across from me under a fume hood in my mind's eye anytime his name is brought up."

"The other one was even creepier. I met 'Dan' when he worked at a local bookstore. This was the summer after my freshman year of high school; he was 17 and had just graduated. He wanted to go out with me, but I wasn’t allowed on night dates yet, so he asked my mother if he could take me to the beach one day. Surprisingly, she agreed. When we got to the car, he asked me to get cigarettes from the glove compartment. Also, there was a handgun, which freaked me out a little. I only saw him one other time. 

He was in the hospital for a dental procedure and asked me to visit with a pack of cigarettes (this was tobacco country: you could smoke everywhere in those days). I knocked and walked in to his mother, yelling at him over something, and she was also pretty snarky to me. Fast forward four years: Dan’s mother has been murdered in bed, and his father is clinging to life in a hospital. Two days later, Dan was shot dead in the hospital parking lot by a cousin who had figured out that Dan had shot his parents. The police went to the family home and found the murder weapon under some floorboards. Yep, it was a handgun. I always assumed that it was the one in the glove box."

"My uncle killed two people. The first one, he stabbed a guy like 80 times, slit his throat ear to ear, and then cut him from balls to throat. He wrote on the walls with the guy's blood, kinda Charles Manson-like. The second person was a woman he met at the bar. He stabbed her around 70 times and dismembered her. I guess the big reason why both went off the deep end and killed somebody is that they got extremely wasted and got very angry for whatever reason. At least that's what I was told."

"Cut to 10 years later — I'm in the ER for a concussion, and I see on the TV that Jenny's mom had just been arrested — for Jenny's murder! She had stabbed her to death in the woods behind a school for being 'addicted to weed.' I hadn't seen her in years, but it was a gut punch. I'm glad I didn't spend more time there — I love weed."

"He killed his girlfriend, stayed inside the house with the body for three days, and then killed himself with a plastic bag. It surprisingly affected me more than I expected, since I barely even knew the guy. I felt sick the whole day."

"Shortly into the first hour of classes, everyone who was a known friend of Andy's was pulled out of class and called into the office. Once we were all there, the principal told us that Andy was alive and that he had actually been the one who committed the murders. Everyone was pretty shocked. This dude was a totally harmless stoner who never even really seemed to disagree with anyone, much less have violent tendencies. 

The funeral was really rough; they had an open casket viewing even though his parents were both shot in the face. Andy claims to have no memory of doing it, and what they've pieced together is that he, for whatever reason, went into his dad's gun locker, pulled out a rifle, and shot his parents in their kitchen. It didn't look like there was any kind of struggle. His brother came up from their basement, and he shot him at the top of the stairs. He then called the police and told the dispatcher that his parents were dead, and when she asked who killed them, he said he had. He went outside and stood on the lawn waiting for the police to come. Once they got there, he went into a full-on panic, asking about his brother; he had no idea that he'd shot him.

He got 18 years for each murder, I think, and was sent to prison. I wrote to him here and there at first, but his replies felt really strange to me. I feel a little bit guilty now about fading out of his life, but it was honestly really, really hard to reconcile the person I was friends with with the person I was writing to, the person who killed his family. He sounded very stiff and hollow in the replies. I guess that makes some sense.

I keep up with the details now through a friend who still keeps in touch with him. He tried to escape a few years ago, the guy he was trying to escape with was killed in the process, and his sentence was upped to life."

"It was really strange afterward. The front glass door had small bloody handprints on it from where the littlest one had tried to escape, and two of the front windows had blood on them. The girl I went to school with spent a long time in the ICU. I walked by their house often on my way to my best friend's, and there was caution tape around it for months. Then the tape fell, and no one did anything. I remember thinking that there seemed to be no justice for the family and that lives were so fragile.

After I found out, I cried pretty hard. I couldn't understand what had happened to my friend and her family. I never saw that girl again, but I hope that she is doing okay."

"Well, naturally, in this day and age, you can't keep a secret like that from a long-inquisitive child with the power of the internet at their fingertips.

So here's the story. He was under his parents' bed waiting to grab my grandpa's wallet to steal some money.  Well, he got caught, my grandpa pulled out his gun cause he didn't know who it was. They fought over it. He shot my grandpa in the chest and strangled my grandmother with a lamp cord. Afterward, he turned the gas on the stove and walked out. Have you ever seen the movies where the pilot light turns on, and everything is incinerated? That's what happened to the house. My great-grandma was still in the house. She used to have a room full of stuffed animals, which burned up, and all the toxins they released caused her to have chemical burns on her body and lungs. Let's just say I no longer find fluffy teddy bears adorable after seeing what happened to her.

Here's a kicker: my sister and I were supposed to be at their house that night. I think what's worse is that because of what he did, my sister and I were declared to be the 'spawn of the devil.' Our family shunned us; they took everything we were supposed to inherit. I can't tell you how much trouble I got into as a kid. This event left me with no emotion other than anger. For years, that's all I could feel or relate to. All I can say is that revenge is never the answer. I watched him die. The state executed him for his crimes. It did not settle anything for me; it didn't make everything better. I watched this man take his last breath, and all I could think about was how I wished that none of this had happened. I wished we could have watched Batman together again one last time."

"Turned out he had hidden behind some bushes and decided to kill the next person who came around on the trail, who happened to be a kid trailing behind his parents on the path. Attacked the boy, then walked up to some construction workers, covered in blood, and turned himself in immediately after. Really fucked up. His mom was a teacher at my school, too."

"Apparently, he went to the party, got into an argument with the host, walked back to his house to get his pistol, and came back and shot the guy in the chest. It was wild. I've never seen him be violent in his life. I used to hang out with his family and play with his kids. Never would've expected it."

Responses have been edited for length/clarity.