5 Grizzly Halloween Murders to Go with Your Candy

We've all heard our fair share of Halloween horror stories—it's what the holiday is all about after all—but rarely do we put much stock into the warnings our mothers issued from behind wagging fingers. And anyway, let's be honest, we were all too eager to collect our sugary dues from lackadaisical neighbors to let any spooky goings-on hold us back.

But sometimes, your mother is right. (Well, most of the time, actually. You should probably go apologize to her. Go on, we'll wait.) And as it turns out, every once in a while there's a bit more substance to those motherly warnings than we'd like to admit, as in the five gruesome cases down below.

The Toolbox Killers Claim Another Victim

Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, or "The Tool Box Killers,"—so called because of their propensity to use pliers, hammers, and other everyday tools in their crimes—were responsible for the kidnapping, rape, torture and murder of five teenage girls over a five month span in 1979.

Their last murder occurred late in the evening of October 31st in southern California. The two were prowling the streets in their beat up van, combing for potential victims when they spotted 16 year old Shirley Lynette Ledford outside a of a gas station in the Sunland-Tujunga suburb of LA. The young girl was hitchhiking home from a Halloween party, and upon recognizing Bittaker as a frequent visitor to the restaurant she waited tables at, accepted the two men's offer of a ride.

Ledford quickly realized she had made a grave mistake as Bittaker guided the van onto a secluded street, and his accomplice made short work of binding and gagging their young victim with construction tape.

Trading places, Norris took the wheel and Bittaker began his grizzly ritual, removing the tape and subjecting Ledford to over an hour of beatings and verbal abuse, shouting at her to "say something" and "scream louder" as he repeatedly bludgeoned her head and breasts, all the while capturing the encounter on a tape recorder the two men shared.

When Ledford begged and pleaded for the beating to stop, Bittaker produced a hammer and began to strike her with it, before moving on to another of the sadistic duos favorite tools—pliers. Ledford was sexually assaulted by Bittaker for an unknown period of time before the tape recorder was jostled and switched back on by Norris, who almost immediately drew a sledgehammer from the men's stock pile of tools, instructing Ledford to scream louder as he struck her with it, fracturing her left elbow. He would then go on to hit her twenty five consecutive times on the same broken limb, before his sneering question was caught in the tape recorder, "What are you sniveling about?"

After around two hours, Norris killed Ledford, strangling the young girl with a wire coat hanger tightened with the same pliers Bittaker had used to torture her.

The two men discarded her body on a random lawn, reportedly so they could see the reaction the press would have to the discovery of her corpse. The next morning, a jogger on his way past the Sunland home stumbled upon Shirley's body and contacted authorities.

In the years following Shirley Ledford's murder, Roy Norris would go on to speak about the tape the two men had recorded of their horrific crime, saying:

"We've all heard women scream in horror films... still, we know that no-one is really screaming. Why? Simply because an actress can't produce some sounds that convince us that something vile and heinous is happening. If you ever heard that tape, there is just no possible way that you'd not begin crying and trembling. I doubt you could listen to more than a full sixty seconds of it."

Lawrence Bittaker is currently incarcerated on death row at San Quentin state prison, and his partner in crime, Roy Norris, is serving life with the possibility of parole at Richard J Donovan Correctional Facility.

A Kennedy is Accused

In Greenwich, Connecticut on October 30th, 1975, Martha Moxley and her friends left their homes to take part in "Mischief Night," an informal event in which the neighborhood kids got together to pull harmless pranks, ringing doorbells, and tp-ing houses while indulgent adults stayed indoors.

According to the fifteen year old's friends, Martha was last seen around 9:30, "falling together behind the fence," with Thomas Skakel, a boy around her own age who lived with his parents and brother, Michael, in the house across from Moxley's Belle Haven home. Thinking to leave the two teens to their Halloween romance, the group went their own way.

The following day, Moxley's body was discovered under a tree in her family's backyard. While her pants and underwear had been pulled down, police found no evidence of sexual assault, something that struck them as odd considering the positioning of the body. Pieces of a broken golf club were found near Martha's corpse and it would be discovered during her autopsy that she had been bludgeoned and stabbed with the club, which was eventually traced back to the Skakel home.

Due to the fact that Thomas was the last person known to have seen the young girl alive, he quickly became the police's prime suspect. Although the boy was armed with a flimsy alibi and authorities had fairly solid evidence pointing towards someone in the Skakel home, Thomas' father forbade access to his school and mental health records, hindering the investigation. Authorities also suspected Kenneth Littleton, the Skakel family's live-in tutor. However, due to lack of evidence, the case swiftly grew cold and investigations stuttered to a stop, frozen for decades.

In the years following, a multitude of books were published and the case drew international attention and speculation, largely due to the fact that the Skakel boys were the nephews of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, the widow of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Thomas and Michael Skakel would change their alibis for the night of Moxley's murder again and again, with Michael eventually settling on a story in which he claimed he'd been peeping into Moxley's window from a nearby tree, and masturbating from 11:30 that evening to 12:30.

Two students from a center for troubled youths in the area testified that they had overheard Michael confess to killing Moxley, and said that Skakel was given special privileges at the school. According to the two boys, Michael had bragged about the events of that night, saying, "I'm going to get away with murder. I'm a Kennedy."

It wasn't until 1991 when William Kennedy Smith was tried and acquitted for rape that the case once again drifted back into national focus. A rumor arose that Smith had been present at the Skakel home the night Moxley was murdered, and it was implied that he may have been involved in the crime. While this proved to be nothing more than hearsay, the gossip served as a kick-starter for a new investigation. A private detective agency, The Sutton Associates, conducted its own investigation, bringing new evidence to light.

It was widely believed, both by outside parties and by those who had personally investigated the murder that Michael Skakel was responsible, but the distant Kennedy wouldn't be brought in again until June of 1998, when a one-man grand jury was invoked to review evidence gathered in the case, and yet another investigation was launched. Finally, authorities agreed they had enough evidence to charge Michael Skakel with murder.

In January of 2000, Skakel was arrested and released shortly after on $500,000 bail. The trial itself wouldn't begin until May of 2002, when Skakel was ultimately found guilty of the murder of Martha Moxley in 1975.

However, attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Skakel's cousin, would go on to write an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled "A Miscarriage of Justice," in which he insisted authorities had imprisoned an innocent man. This combined with the appearance of new witnesses led to a series of appeals and crusades from Skakel's family to alter his sentence, and as late as 2016 they were still campaigning. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. released his book, Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn't Commit and as of now the Moxley case remains officially unsolved and Skakel is free on bond on appeal.

Do These Decorations Seem a Little Too Lifelike to You?

A few days before Halloween, witnesses spotted a resident of their Long Island apartment complex drag a decapitated body out of his residence, reportedly laying it in the street before kicking its head to the opposite curb. Assuming the entire thing to be an admittedly tasteless, but harmless Halloween prank, witnesses were slow to react.

It wasn't until hours later, when a local man attempted to move the corpse out of the middle of the street to ease passing cars, that he discovered it wasn't a decoration at all.

Shortly after authorities were contacted, they were able to identify the body as belonging to sixty-six year old Patricia Ward, a professor at New York's Farmingdale State College. Oddly enough, before the discovery of the elderly woman's body, police had received another call about a dead Ward.

Scrambling to connect the scattered dots, investigators quickly realized that the other Ward in question was Patricia's son, Derek. The thirty-five year old had a long history of mental illness and was reportedly in recovery when he moved into his mother's Farmingdale apartment.

It appeared that, for reasons unknown as the only witnesses to the crime were both deceased, he had snapped and in a fit of rage, decapitated his mother.

Eric then dragged the body down the stairs and out the front doors of the apartment building, leaving it laying in the street before walking to a nearby train track and leaping into the path of an oncoming train.

Halloween Triple Homicide

After spending the weekend at his father's in Columbus, Ohio, sixteen-year-old Devon Griffin stopped by his mother's home on his way to church to pick up a shirt to change into for the service. It was around 9:30 in the morning, and when he arrived at the home he was greeted by his stepbrother, BJ Liske. Liske was friendly to his younger step sibling, inquiring after his weekend and asking when he planned to return home.

The older boy's cordial behavior struck Griffin as odd; the two didn't get along and generally made a point not to speak to one another. Chalking it up to an uncharacteristically good mood, Devon carried on to church without giving the encounter much thought. After the service drew to a close, the teen made his way back to his mother's residence. Although he noted it was unusually quiet, he assumed BJ had left for the day and his mother and stepfather were merely sleeping.

When afternoon rolled around and still the adults hadn't made an appearance, Devon decided to pop into their bedroom and wake them up. Upon opening the door he discovered his mother still in bed with her husband, William Liske, and the covers pulled over the couple's heads.

When Devon called out to them and received no response, he approached the bed and drew back the covers, revealing a brutal murder scene.

Upon investigation, police were able to determine sometime in the early morning hours, BJ had shot his father William five times in the head, before turning the gun on his stepmom. He then beat his stepbrother (Devon's brother) to death with a claw hammer.

BJ was discovered shortly after at the family cabin where he was taken into custody, and in the following trial found guilty of three counts of murder. He is currently serving a life sentence.

Sinister Minister

October 31st, 2012, John White, the minister of a small Michigan church made his way to the home of his then fianceé's daughter, Rebekah Gay. Gay, who lived alone with her three year old son, often allowed White to baby sit the boy, so when the minister made an appearance at her small home, she was happy to let him in.

Unfortunately for the young woman, White's intentions were anything but godly.

After letting him into her home, Gay found herself under attack. White bludgeoned the young woman repeatedly with a mallet before wrapping a zip tie around her throat and tightening it, slowly choking the life out of her while her young son waited in another room.

The minister then stripped his victim's body of all clothing and carried her behind the mobile home and into the woods, where he proceeded to sexually assault her corpse.

When he'd finished the deed, White left her body in the leaves and returned to the trailer, where he calmly dressed her three year old son in his Halloween costume before driving the toddler to his father's home to trick or treat.

In the hours after the murder as police combed the area for any trace of Rebekah, White was reported as gathering his congregation and asking them to pray for the missing young woman. Nearly twenty hours after she'd died, Gay's corpse was discovered still laying on the forest floor behind her home.

White was convicted of her murder, and would go on to commit suicide in prison, but not before his congregation learned the true monster hiding behind the kind face of their former minister.

In 1981 at the age of twenty-two, White was charged with assault and spent two years in prison. He had lured his seventeen year old neighbor, Theresa Etherton, into his basement with promises to show her the race track he'd built, but when she turned to get a better look at the contraption, White stabbed her in the back. Teresa testified that the older man then proceeded to smile down at her, kiss her, and then stab her fifteen times.

The minister was arrested again only a few years later in 1994, when he killed the woman he was having an affair with, leaving her naked body in the woods as he had Rebekah Gay's. Police were unable to gather sufficient evidence that the murder had been premeditated, leaving prosecutor's unable to hand down a sentence any harsher than manslaughter. By the time 2007 rolled around, White was once again free, and as we now know, would go on to commit yet another heinous crime.