12 Disturbing Small Town Murders That Seemingly Came Out of Nowhere

While most tend to think of violence and murder as being associated with big cities, small towns are not immune to devious people looking for a kill. In fact, crimes in small towns can be even more gruesome and upsetting than those in big cities. Not only is it unnerving when places with low crime rate suddenly suffer serious horror, the suspect is usually someone everyone in town knows. With small town killings, your forced to face the prospect the killer is someone you know - someone you think of as a friend.

There is no shortage of small town killings but these gruesome murders make the list for being especially brutal and creepy. It's amazing to see how much violence can happen in places normally considered quiet, peaceful, and of course, safe. And they all take place in areas where children can normally walk around without worry, where doors are never locked. The murders in those places are a special sort of unnatural.  

They will make you reconsider you're next trip to somewhere nice and quiet. You might want to stick to the cities, where at least you know to keep an eye out. 

The Texarkana Moonlight Murderer wreaked havoc in a tiny town on the Texas-Arkansas border in 1946. In 10 weeks five people were dead and another three survived attacks by the same man. He was dubbed the Phantom Killer or Phantom Slayer, because of his disturbing white mask he wore, which some described as just a sack with holes for eyes.

Not only did he brutally beat and, in some cases, shoot the victims, there was also a horrific game-play aspect to his murders. He told one of the first victims, Mary Jeanne Larrey, to run away, so he could chase her and then sexually assault her, before telling her to run away again. Although she survived, many didn't. 

The murders affected the whole town, with people arming themselves and a curfew being instated. To make matters even worse, the killer was never found and the murders remained unsolved. 

The murder of the Kunz family in Athens, WI - a town of less than 1,000 people - became creepier and creepier as more details were unearthed. In 1987, three elderly siblings and their 30-year-old nephew were murdered by gunshot wounds to the head on their property in the middle of the night. Kenneth Kunz, another nephew of the siblings, lived on the property but in a separate trailer from where his two aunts, uncle, and brother were killed. 

He discovered the three bodies. He also noticed his mother, Helen, was missing. 

When police arrived they soon discovered the family had been hoarders. They also discovered Helen had bought a .22 rifle - the same type as the murder weapon - days before the killing. As they poked around more they discovered a slew of disturbing and strange facts: Helen's grandmother had been murdered by her own son, the house was full of strange pornographic images, and Helen's brother was also the father of her son, Kenneth. Evidence revealed the entire family was probably incestuous. 

In another horrific twist, nine months after the murders Helen's body was found buried in a swamp not even 20 miles away. A local man who knew the family - and believed they had substantial cash - was charged and later acquitted for the murders. He was later charged for the kidnapping of Helen, thanks to new testimony from an ex-girlfriend.  He says he was wrongly convicted. 

When murder happens in a small town where everyone knows one another, chances are the victim and their killer weren't strangers. This was the case in Montverde, FL, a small town with a population of 397 where a 12-year-old girl named Georgia Jane Crews was tragically killed. 

In 1980, Crews went missing and the town began a frantic search. Two days later, the police department received a call from an identified caller, "You know that 12-year-old girl you’re looking for? She’s dead.” The girl's grandmother and the police marshal's wife received the same calls. Eight days later her body was found, killed by a stab wound in the back. She was decomposing near a K-Mart parking lot.

Because the town was so small, suspicions were high. No strangers were seen in the area, so they were forced to look inward. Still, the killer was never found. 

There are few things more small town and wholesome than the Girl Scouts, which makes these murders all the more gruesome. While camping in Oklahoma in 1977, eight-year-old Lori Farmer, nine-year-old Michelle Guse, and 10-year-old Doris Milne were taken from their tents. The counselor discovered their bodies the next day - raped, beaten, strangled, and stuffed back into their sleeping bags. 

Gene Leroy Hart, an escaped convict who grew up near the camp, was charged but acquitted. Although DNA was found on the sleeping bags in 2007, it was too deteriorated to be tested. After the murders, the camp was shut down. Unsurprisingly, considering there's no way Girl Scouts in the area were ever the same. 

The murder of 10-month-old Nicole Lee Hattamer still haunts the community of Holcombe, WI. In 1989, the entire Hattamer family was at the child's grandparents house when the child went missing. The police found the child just after midnight, 72 feet from the house and frozen face down in the grass. According to the autopsy, the baby was thrown on the ground, landed on her chest - which caused internal bleeding - and was subsequently let to die. 

The questions around the murder led to an FBI investigation - quite the the event for a town of 920 people - but nothing was found. There have also been multiple John Doe hearings, to no avail. The murder remains unsolved. 

Mary Ann Holmes was a 29-year-old mother of two when she was murdered in her home in Thatcher, AZ. At the time of her attack, her two daughters were home. One of them managed to run, naked and bound, to tell a neighbor her mother was dead. Holmes was found in her bathroom handcuffed with her head bashed in. Evidence suggested she had been sexually assaulted after her death, all while her daughters were bound and forced to watch. 

The search for the killer was extreme. The small Mormon farming community was rocked by the death. Police interviewed 75 people, but nothing was immediately found. Then, in 2016, Phillip Turley, 53, was named a prime suspect, though he hasn't been formally charged.

The strange connection between these two murders makes them all the more disturbing. In 1993, 10-year-old Holly Piirainen went missing while visiting her grandparents in Sturbridge, MA. Only her shoe was found until over two months later, when her body was discovered near a rural road. The surrounding area was devastated and many reached out to Holly's family, including 10-year-old Molly Bish, who wrote “I am very sorry, I wish I could make it up to you. Holly is a very pretty girl. She is almost as tall as me. I wish I knew Holly. I hope they found her.”

But then in 2000, Molly went missing at the age of 16. Despite frantic searching, her body wasn't found until three years later. It's unclear if it was the same killer, but because they were buried in a similar manner in the same region of Massachusetts, some believe they are linked.  Brothers Rodney and Randy Stanger have been suspects in the two cases - Rodney in Molly's case and Randy's in Holly's.

However, no one has ever been charged with either crime. These two murders remain a mystery. 

David Parker Ray, aka The Toy Box Killer, is accused of killing as many as 60 people near the small town of Truth or Consequences, NM. While the bodies were never discovered, Ray was convicted of kidnapping and torture in 2001. He died in 2002 after he had a heart attack. 

Ray and spent $100,000 on creating "The Toy Box," a torture chamber were he and his girlfriend Cindy Lea Hendy would keep the women they captured. It was completely with tools, anatomy books, S&M tools, and a video screen where women were forced to look at what was being done to them, as they were forced into an examination chair. The police ultimately found one of these videos after a woman managed to escape and get help. 

One of the creepiest small-town murders dates all the way back to March 1874 in a small town in Illinois. The entire Stelzriede family was killed in a single night. A neighbor, who noticed he hadn't seen the family in a while, went to check on them and found Fritz Stelzriede brutally murdered with an ax. Inside, he found the boy's father, mother, grandfather, brother, and sister all killed with an ax - and some with their throats slit, for good measure. The brutality of the ax, especially against children, makes this an extra bone-chilling murder. 

Nicholas Pistor, who wrote a book on the murders, explained how the incident affected the town: "Not only did they know this family very well, but the person who did it most likely was living amongst them. And it set off this horrible suspicion among everyone, thinking someone with an ax is out there and he might come and try and kill me." 

The killer was never found. 

The murders in Bear Brook State Park in New Hampshire came to light when the unidentified remains of two bodies were found in a barrel in 1985. A young women and a girl appeared to have been killed by blunt force trauma before being stuffed in the barrel.

But it gets weirder - 15 years later, another barrel was found not far from the first. The remains of two young girls were inside. Testing revealed all four died around the same time, and the woman who was found was related to at least two of the girls. 

The case remains one of New Hampshire's biggest, and investigators still are trying to figure out what exactly happened.