Life Copies Satire

From The Onion 22 April 1998:

DUNEDIN, FL—In the wake of his capture Monday, serial killer Eddie Lee Curtis is being recalled by neighbors as a serial killer.

"He was kind of a murderous, insane, serial-killer type of fellow," said Will Rowell, 57, who lived next door to the man arrested for the murder of 14 nurses in Florida and Georgia. "He sort of kept to himself, killing nurses, having sex with their corpses, and then burying the bodies in his backyard."

Neighbor Peg Appleton agreed: "I didn't know him that well, but he really seemed to hate nurses, the way he was always dismembering them with power tools. I guess you could say he fancied himself a serial killer."

From The Daily Mail 11 August 2011:

A gunman who killed seven people during a rampage through his Ohio neighbourhood has been described as 'quiet and strange'. Michael Hance, 51, died in a shootout with police in Copley, Ohio, after the killing spree on Sunday, where he shot seven people dead, including his girlfriend's 11-year-old nephew.

Ms Hancock, 53, of Akron, told CBS news: 'He was quiet and strange.' The gunman was also described as 'unpleasant' and 'disliked'.

Hance had become increasingly belligerent over residents' comments about the state of the property he lived in with his girlfriend of two decades, Becky Dieter. His neighbour Carol Eshleman said Hance had been asked to clean up his property by another resident, Gudrun 'Gerdie' Johnson, around a month ago, but he had thrown her off his property.

He began gunning people down after Miss Dieter's family had visited the couple to try and settle a dispute over the property.