33. He would go days at a time not speaking to anyone and doing nothing but drinking alone
“My paternal grandparents died in a murder-suicide. My grandfather shot my grandmother in their kitchen and then went outside and hung himself on a tree, and my father discovered them when he got home from school.
This all happened before I was born and my father’s side of the family wasn’t involved in my life until I was an adult (my mom divorced him when I was little and I never met him/talked to him, didn’t hear from my half-siblings and other people on that side until I was 18). I first heard about this from my mother when I was probably about 13, she told me that my father told her this but that she didn’t know whether or not it was true (my dad, apparently, was a compulsive liar) but when I got in touch with my half-sibling and my father’s siblings later on they confirmed it. This happened in the late 1950s. According to them my grandfather was always a very moody person. He would go days at a time not speaking to anyone and doing nothing but drinking alone, he hated it when anyone would try to bother him or talk to him. My grandmother was very meek, a bit of a shut-in, and while she was more affectionate to the family than my grandfather she also pretty much kept to herself and didn’t do anything more than she had to for the kids. My father’s siblings told me that there was domestic violence in their relationship, that the most emotion they ever saw my grandfather show was when he was screaming at/hitting my grandmother, that she would try to get him to eat dinner or ask him for money to go grocery shopping or something small and he’d just snap, grab her and shake her, and start screaming at her about why she wouldn’t just leave him alone.
The day this happened my father’s siblings told me was very strange. My grandfather joined them for breakfast before it was time for them to go to school which was totally odd because he never ate meals with them and they remember very specifically that he thanked my grandmother when she put his plate down and then walked with them to the bus stop and watched them get on the bus, waving at them as it left. They’ve told me that that’s what they remember the most about that day, how nice and attentive he was, because it was so out of the ordinary.
They’ve all said that they think he already knew what he was going to do that morning when they left for school. One of my father’s sisters has told me that it wasn’t even shocking that he would kill himself or their mother and that the only thing surprising about it was that she never thought he’d shoot her (there was apparently some confusion about it because none of them even knew that he owned a gun), and that she always thought he’d end up strangling her to death or going too far while he was shaking her and ‘bash her head into a wall or something’.”
34. He was universally liked in school.
“The valedictorian of my graduating high school class ended up murdering his wife. I sat next to him in a few classes too. Talked to him often. He was universally liked in school. Not an athlete but incredibly smart. Rarely study and got straight A’s, he would do his homework in the library at lunch so he wouldn’t have to do much of anything at home. He could have gone to post-secondary for literally anything. Found God and became a pastor. That’s what put it on a whole new level. Long story short, he was having an emotional affair with a member of his congregation/former member of his congregation. He did not want to ‘sin’ so decided best course of action was to kill his pregnant wife. He experimented at least once with a smoothie laced with lorazepam I believe it was. It didn’t kill her so he did it again and put her/had her take a bath while she was loopy. Then went for a run and when he came back she had drowned. We are from a small town so it was big news. Extremely shocking when it happened. Literally no warning signs that I saw growing up. They could not prove beyond a doubt he did it so he got manslaughter. I believe 8 years that he is appealing currently. Really fucked up considering there were searches on his computer for ‘how much lorezepam’ is needed to kill someone’ (I am paraphrasing that search. I’ll try and find a link to the article.