15 Seemingly Upstanding Members of Society Who Turned Out to Be Monsters

When you think of evil, the people that come to mind are Hitler, Stalin, or the Koch brothers, but you never think of run-of-the-mill folks that act nice and keep to themselves. As you’ll soon find out, a lot of people that were secretly evil were able to keep their terrifying natures a secret by scaring their victims into silence, paying them off, or killing them and hoping for the best. True evil takes many forms, and in many modern cases, the big E rears its head whenever someone is in a position of power over children. For whatever reason, some of the most “normal” people seem to focus on young people as a way to work out their brutal fantasies while putting on a mask for the rest of the world.

These stories of upstanding citizens secretly being monsters make a strong case for not ever trusting an authority figure again. Why be nice to your assistant principal if he probably has a couple of students chained up in his basement? And your favorite athlete? He probably kidnapped a woman while wearing a rubber mask that made him look like an extra from Point Break. After reading about these nightmare people who were masquerading as bastions of society, the only people you’ll want to surround yourself with are the rude and volatile, the people who couldn’t pretend to be someone else even if they wanted to.

Most people think of comedy superstar Bill Cosby as America's Grandpa, but the sick truth of the matter is that he's been dealing with sexual assault allegations since the mid-60s, when he was just getting to the height of his stand-up comedy career. It wasn't until 2014 that Cosby's history of rape allegations was pushed into the national spotlight when comedian Hannibal Buress dedicated a stretch of his set to Cosby. According to the LA Times, more than 40 women have come forward to accuse Cosby of drugging them and then committing some type of sexual assault.

Who knew that the House Republican Chief Deputy Whip would be a real life boogey man? This ex-Boy Scout volunteer, former high school teacher, and longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House in history was hiding the secret that as a teacher at Yorkville High School in the '70s, he sexually abused a student and paid him off over the years to the tune of $1.7 million with the promise of topping it out at $3.5 million.  

Jimmy Savile was a guy who did everything on BBC. He raised money for charity, hosted Top of the Pops, was friends with Margaret Thatcher, and had even been knighted. Let that sink in. HE WAS A KNIGHT.

People loved him, he could do anything he wanted, and he did. It wasn't until after his death in 2011 that the allegations of Savile's sexual abuse began to be reported in the media. He molested over 70 adults and children over the course of his career, according to.reports. One of the most heinous claims was that after filming a 1973 Christmas episode of Top of the Pops, he dressed as a Womble in order to rape a 10-year-old boy and sexually assault a 12-year-old girl. 

It's an understatement to say that Jerry Sandusky was a big deal in the world of Penn State. From 1969 to 1999, he worked as an assistant coach to Joe Paterno, and upon his retirement, he received "both an unusual compensation package and a special designation of 'emeritus' rank that carried special privileges, including access to the university’s recreational facilities."

After a three-year investigation, in 2011 Sandusky was indicted on 40 counts of sex crimes against young boys. The assaults took place in his basement, a high school, a random hotel room, and in the Lasch Football Building on Penn State's University Park campus.

This scandal had a terrible effect on the community surrounding Penn State - not just because the football team was suddenly in turmoil, but because the institution of Penn State knew about Sandusky's molestation allegations and never did anything about it. They even went so far as to allow Sandusky to run a summer football camp for boys on a Penn State satellite campus for six years after they knew about the allegations. 

To his friends, Josef Fritzl was just a guy who rented out properties and who liked to party. Due to Austrian law, his record of rape, assault, and indecent exposure had been expunged 15 years after he served an 18-month prison sentence, and how were they supposed to know that he had built a semi-sound proof room in his basement where was keeping one his daughters so he could consistently rape her over the course of 24 years?

Even though his daughter had multiple children because of his Fritzl's incestuous reign of terror, it wasn't until 2008, when his 19-year-old-daughter (the progeny of Fritzl and his daughter Elisabeth) had to go to the hospital that he was finally caught. He's now serving life in prison in Garsten Abbey.

Throughout the '70s and '80s, Frank Beck worked with Leicestershire Social Services with emotionally damaged children. His peers thought that he was a charismatic and innovative social worker, but in reality, he was pretending to pioneer a form of "reversion therapy" in order to cover his extreme sexual assault of children. Not only did Beck dress his patients like babies and have nurses cut up their meals, but he also violently sexually assaulted one 12-year-old boy so severely that he had to cover up the child's death by pretending that it was a suicide. 

As a rule of thumb, firefighters, whether they're in New York City or not, get a pass with most things. If you're willing to run into a burning building, then you can have a free cup of coffee. But in 2016, Jason Stokes, a New York firefighter, burned down his own home in an apparent attempt to smear the Black Lives Matter movement.

Fire investigators found the message “lie with pigs, fry like bacon” written on some siding outside the burned-down home, but that didn't fool the detectives, who discovered multiple gas cans placed throughout the home, which they said appeared to be booby-trapped.

Stokes hasn't commented on the crime, but it's obvious that he was trying to help create a false narrative about the anti-police brutality activists. 

Before killing six people, ranging from 4-year-old Zachary Stay to 39-year-old Stephen Robert Stay, in a domestic dispute in the middle of nowhere in Texas, Ron Haskell was a fairly normal, well-liked guy.

At his high school in Alaska, he was not only a class clown, but someone who made body positivity a thing. Former high school classmate Carolee Beckham told the Houston Chronicle, "He made everyone feel like it was OK to be who you were."

This Swedish doctor had lived out his life as someone that the public could trust in some of their most vulnerable moments, but he was harboring a frightening secret just below his home in southern Sweden - a sex bunker. In late 2015, Trenneborg met up with a woman in Stockholm for a date, where he pretended to be an American and drugged her with rohypnol-laced strawberries. Afterwards, he put her in a rubber old person mask and drove 350 miles back to his home where he locked her in his bunker and forced her to sign a sex contract saying she would provide a "girlfriend experience." 

Six days after the kidnapping, Trenneborg went back to Sweden to pick up some of the woman's things and found out that she had been listed as a missing person, so he brought the woman to his local police station so she could tell the cops that she was fine. That didn't really work out as well as he hoped and he was arrested on the spot. 

In 2016, Doug Allison, the principal of Mountain View Christian School, a Seventh-Day Adventist school, was charged with raping and sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl and her classmate, whom he claimed had been "asking for it."

It's frightening enough that Doug was a pillar of the religious community, but the fact that he used his position as an educator and as someone who believed that they had a direct line to a deity to molest children doesn't simply ruin the lives of the children he came into contact with, it destroys the credibility of everyone he worked with.