Small towns have this rep that nothing ever happens there. Nothing good or bad, but is that true? Are small towns really that uneventful? These small townfolks can say otherwise. They reveal the biggest scandal that ever happened in their ‘small town’ hometown and some will surprise us all. Content has been edited for clarity purposes.
Doctor Gone Mad
“There was an anesthetist, who worked at our local hospital and another hospital in a different town. He was rather well known among other doctors and known to be good at what he was doing. He only had a small problem with being addicted to painkillers and anesthetics.
So to feed his addiction without getting caught, he would shoot up part of his patients’ medicines before injecting the same needle into his patient. Thus, it went unnoticed until it was discovered that over 60 of his patients got infected with hepatitis. And that he was the source for it.
He was fired and his license revoked as far as I know. But the hospital’s image still suffered quite a bit.”
Who Really Murdered The Wife?!
“We don’t live in a super small town, but small enough. There was a murder that happened about 20 years ago that has left everyone scandalized. It was a woman who lived on the wealthy side of town. Her husband was an engineer who worked in a neighboring town about 45 minutes away. He came home to find his wife had been brutally slaughtered. He called the cops, etc.
The man who got arrested was this no-name addict idiot whose only connection to this family was that he installed the security system. No one could ever figure out a motive, however. He had three trials, all hung juries. So he got off eventually, but the elapsed time was several years. Poor guy.
Meanwhile, the husband moved several states away and said that he was terrified of this dumb punk kid, which was really dumb. No one around town believes that the punk did it. So here’s the juicy back story that never made it in the official story.
First, they found adult content on the husband’s computer, which was odd to begin with since he claimed that the murderer put it there. Apparently, there were a group of super-wealthy (and I mean one percent of the one percent. Not sure why they want to live here, but whatever) locals who were engaging in swinging. The murder victim and her husband were members of this group. One of the other members of this group was a high-powered attorney around here. He is an absolute snake. He ensured that the punk kid trapped himself into a made-up confession that never had any merit.
The reason the attorney did that was to hide the fact that it was actually his wife who most likely committed the murder. The murder victim and the attorney were apparently having a private affair separate from the swinging. The attorney’s wife found out and lost it and killed the woman.”
Cop Went Uncover As High Schooler And Found More Than What He Was Looking For
“A Wyoming DCI (detective chief inspector) undercover officer was placed in the high school to bust what they considered illegal substance smuggling. He was like 23 or 24 years old but looked really young. He told an elaborate story about how he was from San Diego and his parents were fine with him living there by himself.
He had a studio apartment that was completely wired with video and audio. The kids he made friends with and were supposedly a part of this smuggling would come over and drink, smoke pot, and occasionally drop acid. The kids would talk about how they were going to get sheets of acid from a dealer in Denver and distribute it across town. Well, that was enough to have the agents bust down the door of the apartment one night and arrest everyone there. All minors. Everyone got charged with possession with intent to distribute even though the only illegal substance there was pot.
Fast forward a couple of months later and it came out that the undercover agent was in a relationship with one of the kids that got busted. This resulted in the whole case being dropped and all the kids were exonerated. The agent was convicted and spent some time in prison.
The whole case was the definition of entrapment anyway. The town had a population of 1k at the time so obviously, it was the talk of the town.”
“The Entire Town Thinks The Parents Did It”
“A girl from my high school had a little girl, around one years old. The grandma of the child was watching it but left to go to the bathroom. There was the grandma’s three-year-old son and the child’s grandfather in the room. When the grandma came back, the girl was missing. The three-year-old boy said she was crying, so he let her out, meanwhile, the grandpa was asleep.
She filed a police report and within four hours, the little girl was found a mile away. She drowned in the nearest neighbor’s lake, which was surrounded by barbed wire fencing, only accessible from the front of the house. Deemed that the girl somehow wandered over to the lake a mile away and got past the barbed wire fencing without piercing her skin, no grass stains on hands, and no sign of struggle, then drown itself in the newly constructed lake that only one person knew about.
The land in my hometown is super hilly and would be hard to walk that far as an adult, let alone a toddler. The mother and father didn’t seem as distraught as you’d expect. Child Protective Services took the three-year-old miracle child since the grandmother was unfit to house a child obviously.
The father’s mother (the other grandma) made a goFundMe for the couple since the father was out of work, and they couldn’t afford a funeral. Overnight, $5,000 was raised. The mother and father took the money and left the county the next day.
I personally know the woman who was watching the child, and she’s a lovely lady who loves her family. It’s a shame she lost her son to this incident. The entire town thinks the parents deliberately drowned their daughter.”
Deer-Napped
“Deer are a big deal in rural western Pennsylvania. Hunters from other counties and states account for firmly 80 percent of my home county’s tourism statistics. Deer breeding is also an insanely lucrative industry for even a small ranch if you have good bucks. Massive bucks with racks over 15 points can sell for half a million dollars or more.
In 1999, a two-year-old, 260 pounds, 28-point buck deer named ‘Goliath’ was deer-napped from the private deer farm where he resided. He was tranquilized, dragged out through a hole cut in the fence, and carted off in a pickup, stolen from his owners who had bottle-fed and raised him for two years. Presumably taken by a hunter as an antler trophy or by a competitor or shady seller for his highly promising and lucrative deer-breeding sperm.
The couple who owned the ranch offered a $100,000 reward for Goliath’s safe return. The town was evidently ablaze with rumors for a while, but the owners were afraid he had been killed for his rack and wouldn’t ever come home. Goliath wasn’t seen for a long time.
Four years later, in 2003, members of the deer breeding association were performing rounds and found a deer at another ranch about 50 miles away named ‘Hercules’ that was 375 pounds and a record-breaking 50-60 points, but people noticed that it looked familiar. They sent a picture of ‘Hercules’ to the original owners of Goliath who immediately recognized him, and DNA ultimately confirmed that this was indeed Goliath. No longer missing. He was returned home.
I believe there was a court case asking for damages and back pay for any direct descended fawns or sperm sold by the rancher who bought the stolen buck, which amounted to an insane amount of money.
I do know that Goliath, the deer stolen for his record-breaking spunk, was the largest whitetail buck ever bred in captivity at the time that he died. He was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for sale and probably much more in sperm and sired fawns over his lifetime. He passed away back at his home ranch in December of 2004 at a little over seven years old.”
Smugglers
“I live in a Canadian border town. This one police officer was very nice. My grandmother cleaned for him and he would gift her things. He seemed to have a lot more money than your average cop. She would get cheese and other things. The most gifted item, however, was cheese.
Now, at the same time, there was a pizza place down the street from my house. The owners lived a couple of doors down. I was friends with their son, and the parents were pretty cool as far as neighbors went.
They also had a lot of money, for owning a pizza place in decline. After a bit, things got serious. I would see undercover police sitting at the end of my street on my way home from school nearly every day. They weren’t very incognito, but neither was the pizza place owners. Eventually, though, things came crashing down. A whole bunch of cops and restaurant owners were taken to jail in the largest cheese bust the town has ever known.
That’s right. Cheese.
The price of cheese in Canada is ridiculous, so a few members of the police department decided to use their abilities to smuggle it across the border. They would go across, buy all the cheap, good-quality stuff they could get, and then use their badge to get back across. The border patrol and cops all know each other, so the chance of them paying duty was zero percent.
Anyways, that was the big scandal in the town. You can probably look it up if you search for cheese smugglers or cheese scandal.”
The Revenge Of The Locals
“The local drinker got into an argument with another regular at a popular bar, pulled out his weapon, and shot the other guy to death. But that’s not the scandal. The guy who died was apparently really nice and well-liked in the community. The others in the bar were able to disarm and restrain the assailant until the police arrived.
When the sheriff got there, he just said, ‘Looks like you all need a few more minutes with him. I’ll come back later.’
So everyone in the bar grabbed what they could find and ended up killing the man. The sheriff reported it as self-defense and the security tapes disappeared. But the bar was crowded, so the real story got out. There were a few attempts to reopen the case or charge the sheriff and some of the bar patrons, but they were all squashed pretty quickly.
The really interesting detail, in my opinion, is that there were some pretty strong rumors that the man had been sleeping with the wife of the man he killed and that he’d been attacked first. So the original shooting may have been in self-defense. But because there was no camera footage and all the witnesses were involved in the killing, there’s no way of knowing the truth.”
Their Teacher Was On The Front Page Of The Newspaper
“We had a physical education teacher that was beloved; she was awesome. She was a substitute for several years before getting picked up full time and she was everyone’s favorite. Kids celebrated when she became a regular teacher. She was submitted for so many awards that it was ridiculous. She was dating another physical education teacher who was not so beloved, and I’m unsure if he was the target of what happened next for her.
She went on vacation with her boyfriend. They took a picture posing at the beach. Totally standard picture but if you paid attention you could see his arm wasn’t just around her shoulders, his hand was resting on her chest (or not, it just looked like it might be, it could even have just been dangling in front of her chest). She posted it on her private, very much locked down Facebook page that no students had access to. There weren’t even any other teachers on her Facebook page.
Someone pointed out in a comment that it looked suggestive.
She replied, ‘Holy cow! I did not catch that. Thank you so much!’
Then she took it down right away.
Months later, someone turned in a screenshot of the picture. They couldn’t even log in and show you the picture because it had been taken down less than a day after it was posted. Someone took that screenshot, put it in a folder, and then later down the road decided for some reason, they should report it. She was fired, and the whole community was outraged. For weeks it was on the front page of the newspaper every day, as more and more information came in. The editorial section was blowing up with letters telling her to sue, which she did. And she lost.”
The 10k Bribe
“My home county had a few historic covered bridges. They were quite the pride and joy of the area. One day, somebody burnt one down. Somebody else saw three young men do the deed. Now we all knew it was a trio of kids in my class. Like most schools, we had cliques, two of which were the ‘preps’ and the ‘burnouts.’ The bridge burners were preps. One’s dad was the county judge, while one’s mom was the primary real estate agent in town. This posed a dilemma.
So the parents of the preps, including the judge, hatched a little plan. They gave three burnouts in my class $10,000 each (mind you, this was in the mid-1980s) and the promise of a light sentence of six months probation if they would plead guilty and take the fall.
The burnouts agreed and took their money. The judge figured if the burnouts didn’t hold up their end he would make sure they were found guilty anyway. So they showed up in court in front of the prep’s judge dad. They not only didn’t plead guilty, but they also had a speeding ticket dated the same day and time as the time the bridge burned. Plus, the speeding ticket was for 70 miles away and since all three were minors, all three were named in the ticket report.
The judge had no choice but to dismiss the case. And the parents of the preps weren’t even mad because that was enough of an excuse to effectively end the whole investigation. Nobody got in trouble for it. It all just went away. The bridge was rebuilt, the placard was changed to say ‘replica of a historic bridge’, and for $10k, those precious little boys didn’t get a black mark in their records.”
Tough Competition
“Where I grew up in the north of Scotland, there were a couple of Indian restaurants owned by two different men. One of the owners didn’t like the fact that he was competing for business with the other guy, so he paid a local man to burn the other restaurant down one night. Not only did the local guy manage to leave his mobile phone at the crime scene, but he also caught his hair in the flames. He went into the local hairdressers the next day to have it fixed, while the restaurant was still smoldering.
Predictably he ended up in prison, along with the owner who had paid him, and his restaurant was closed down. The other guy found another location and carried on trading.”
A Secret Affair In The Police Station
“About a year or so later, the patrol supervisor and a recently hired deputy got in trouble. A young single mom had just been hired and was going through training before being sent off to the academy. She was being trained under one of the other deputies until the patrol supervisor came along and said that he would take over her training. No one expected they were doing anything since he was a well-known family man with a wife and two kids.
Then one evening his wife was just trying to be nice and put his smartwatch on the charger and as she did, a message popped up and she saw that it was a text message from the girl he was training saying how she loved him and that she couldn’t wait to spend the rest of their lives together. It turned out they started hooking up shortly after he took over their training and he was planning on leaving his wife for her. Our sheriff’s office has a no adultery policy and so when the wife found out she took what she had found to the sheriff. Oh, I should probably mention that she also worked at the sheriff’s office as a dispatcher and her father was the jail supervisor.
Both the husband and the girl were fired. The husband and wife divorced soon after and now the husband and girl are together and have a kid together.”
They Busted Him For What He Grew In His Garden – What Was It?!
“In 2013, I moved to a very small rural town. I bought a handyman special and proceeded to fix it up. I painted, did landscaping, and put up an eight-foot privacy fence. In the back corner, I planted a garden with all the usual veggies, and a large portion was dedicated to okra.
One day, a couple of months later, I was sitting on my couch when I heard a commotion in the backyard. I went running out the back door, only to be met with dozens of armed men in full tactical gear. All weapons were pointing at me.
I hit the ground and spread the eagle because I didn’t want to die, but I was thoroughly confused. As I lied there with my face in the dirt, I heard an uproar of laughter coming from the back corner where my garden was located.
It seems the local cops took it upon themselves to call in the DEA for a huge weed crop on my property. Turned out some nosey busy body had reported seeing weed in my garden and turned me in. To this day, the cops in this town have not lived down the day they called in the DEA to bust me for my okra crop.
It cost this little town 10,000 dollars and was in the local paper for wasting all that money because they didn’t just knock on my door and ask to see my garden.”
Her Weapon Of Choice Was Mountain Dew
“I lived in a small town with a population of 300 people. There was this house you would drive past on the way to the city that locals always pointed at and told the story about the couple who lived there back in the ’80s.
The husband got sick for weeks at a time then he eventually ended up at the hospital. He got better within a week at the hospital and he seemed to be completely fine. Then his wife showed up with his favorite drink Mountain Dew. He drank it and a couple of days later, he was very sick again.
Well long story short, she was mixing the mountain dew with swamp water. She was trying to kill him. Eventually, she got caught and arrested.”
This Sheriff Had His Own Side Hustle
“When I was a kid, I lived in a small town, like 200 people. I was 12, had the only pool in town, so suffice it to say, I was ‘popular’ and ‘dated’ (or whatever 12-year-olds do) the Sheriff’s daughter. I suspected she may have been using me for my pool but when you are twelve years old, you don’t really take life too seriously. While we were ‘going steady’, her father was involved with a scandal that forced him to resign, although none of us understood at the time why the scandal was even a thing.
The Sheriff lived in a house that was also in the same building structure as the County Jail, which was also next door to his ranch. Sometimes he would allow the inmates/trustees to go outside onto his ranch and do farm labor (very rarely, but sometimes) so this was what was being talked about publicly as to why he was not running for reelection. In fact, he and his daughter moved to a town about 30 miles away due to the scandal.
Now what really happened was that he was involved with assisting the 1980’s OG Mafia with smuggling operations approved by as high up as the governor at the time. The Sheriff’s deputy even ‘allegedly’ burned down two witnesses’ houses.”
Toxic Substances Exposed
“Back in the late 90s, a local school district decided to allow a construction company to use some of its properties for dumping on the condition that the construction company cap it and build sports fields on top of it. Turns out the construction company dumped years worth of toxic substances there (like any moron could have guessed they would), and the school district covered it all up when they were told by the state that results of the testing indicated a laundry list of carcinogens on site. It didn’t come to light until local students started developing unusual cancers and dying.”
Mission Failed
“This guy named Marcus Schrenker was about to face charges for defrauding investors out of millions of dollars so he decided to fake his death and live off the insurance payout by jumping out of his plane and making it appear he had died in a plane crash.
He stashed a motorcycle in a storage unit in a backwoods Alabama town and went back to Indiana. He flew from Indiana and got over Alabama and radioed that his windshield had imploded before parachuting out. His plane was intercepted by the military before it reached the coast of Florida and the door was open and the cockpit was dark. It ended up crashing in the Florida Bayou.
He made his escape in the motorcycle that he had stashed but was soon caught.”
His Power Couldn’t Win This Case
“The mayor’s son crashed his car into a ravine, but amazingly came out uninjured. He reported his car was stolen because he had been driving under the influence. The cops were pressured by his father (the mayor) to write it up as stolen. When the insurance company started investigating the claim, they realized something was off in the police reports and the testimony given by the mayor’s son. They learned of the coverup and notified the state police.
The mayor, his son, and the police chief were charged with insurance fraud. The mayor was sentenced to five years probation and resigned from office, his son was sent to prison for three years, and the police chief (who testified against the mayor and his son for immunity) was fired by the new mayor.”
