26. “The Birnies Will Get You”
I grew up in a suburb in Western Australia where there was a notorious serial killer couple, they abducted, raped, tortured and killed several young women and were only caught because one of their victims got away. As a kid they were kind of like the bogey-man, we used to freak each other out by saying things like, “watch out, don’t do that or go there or the Birnies will get you”.
When I was about 22 I was having a drink with my parents one night (we were all a bit drunk) and my dad told me that he had received a phone-call in the middle of the night when I was about 18 months old from someone who was very likely David Birnie, telling him that he knew where his daughter was. Dad told him that his daughter was in her bed, hung up and wrote it off as a prank call until he later saw that one of the victims had the same surname and lived on the same street as us. So yeah, the neighbourhood serial-killer called my parents because he called the wrong number in the phone book. When my dad told me this he got really emotional about it because he felt bad about not calling the police, and it gave me the heebie-jeebies big time. I’m really glad I never knew about it until I was an adult.
27. Six-Year-Old Disappears
I’m from a small, rural town of about 1,500 people. A six year old girl went missing in the 80’s. It was a huge deal. A lot of people in town scoured the surrounding fields and forests for her, but she never turned up. It was really sad, and people talked about it for years.
In the early 2000’s, a young woman of the right age came to town and started claiming to be the missing girl. People got really excited and hopeful. Turned out she was just lying for attention. It really upset a lot of people.
28. A Couple Murdered Their Daughter And Reported Her Missing
There was a restaurant a block or two from my parent’s house owned by a couple. They had a little girl, and one day she went missing. The dad called the police that evening saying she must have wandered off. Turns out that morning the mom got mad at her and hit her in the head so hard it killed her. They hid her body in the kitchen and went along the rest of the day as normal, serving customers and everything, with the daughter they recently murdered hidden in the back. Only after closing did they call the police, and made up the story about her going missing.
