Who Is The Most Infamous Person You Ever Met?

[madinmaryland]

I walked past Phil Giordano once in Waterbury when he was still mayor there.

I also met Bordeaux Joe Ganim at a Christmas Tree festival in Bridgeport, the year before he was sentenced to nine years for corruption.

[LeftyMom]

1. Dorothea Puente.

She used to come into the bar where my parents worked to get a drink and collect her boarders when they'd had a few too many. She was also killing her boarders and burying them in the yard, so she could keep collecting their social security.

She grew beautiful roses. My mother was always very envious of that, and got cuttings from her. Roses love sulfur, and human bodies are full of it.

[Bennyboy]

43. She wrote a couple of books....

How to grow roses in seven easy steps.....
How to run a boarding house on a skeleton crew....

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. My 7 yo son. He STILL "tags" the walls, furniture and cupboards.

[underpants]

3. Ollie North

at the Colin Powell Leadership Convention (or whatever it was called) in '97 or '98

I walked over as he was checking in (with several wispy looking college Republican types) and said, "You are an embarassment"

[MrCoffee]

4. you rule.

that's mighty fine work, underpants. mighty fine.

[Richardo]

7. Me too.

At a 'Hannity/North' gabfest in Houston. We (B&N) were selling their books in the lobby and he stopped by before the show to sign about 100 of them. Actually a pretty personable guy. He took pics with his fans for about 45 minutes after the event.

Hannity was too good for the rabble. No autographs, no pics. Why they worship him I'll never know.

[NewJeffCT]

8. how did he react?

just curious.

and, is he that short in person?

Good job, by the way.

[underpants]

10. He didn't

I had some liquid courage in me and I walked up to him while he was checking in. He heard me but he just stood there emotionless....at least that was all I saw. I turned around and walked away.

[The_Casual_Observer]

32. I saw that guy at a book signing. I remember that he was kind of

grey/ashen looking & had weird teeth & mouth.

[MnFats]

28. kick ass!! did he respond?

would love an opportunity to insult and taunt him.
"Now go away, before I taunt you a second time!"

[tigereye]

40. we just yelled at him in the town square while he was making a speech

I'm not proud of that when I look back at it, but he really, really pissed me off!


good on ya, UP!

[MrCoffee]

5. i met Fat Tony...he flat-out refused to say anything about Bush v. Gore

[Iggo]

6. Rodney King.

Nice enough dude. Soft spoken.

I imagined him to be this huge guy. But, after I met him, I wondered to myself, "How tiny were them coppers?"

[kwassa]

9. sleazeball celebrity attorney Larry Feldman

O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson cases

[Iggo]

11. Not a COMPLETE sleazeball.

He does work for The Innocence Project, no?

[kwassa]

15. don't think so.

[kay1864]

17. Maybe you're thinking of Barry Scheck.

Who kinda-sorta redeemed himself by founding the Innocence Project.

[NewJeffCT]

12. A bunch of NBA players - if they were in high school in the 90s

I probably met them. I used to do sportswriting on the side and traveled all over the east coast to see top high school players compete. So, I probably got to see 90% of the top high school players out there during that time.

So, if you consider any NBA stars to be "infamous" I probably saw them back in the day (except for the guys from overseas)

[Archae]

13. I may have met Jeffrey Dahmer, briefly.

On a Milwaukee city bus.

Really quiet guy, sitting in the seat across the aisle.
After he was arrested and I saw his picture on the news, he did look like the guy I saw on the bus.

[terrya]

14. I saw Fred Phelps at a protest here in Chicago.

He was protesting at a church that was performing same-sex marriages. He's an ugly, ugly man. In all definitions of the word.

That's as close as I'd ever want to meet that evil motherfucker.

[mzteris]

16. Probably Barbara Stager

She killed TWO husbands. She got away with the first one, but not the second.

reviews from book about her:

". . . This story of a Durham, North Carolina, woman who appeared to be a devoted mother, meticulous housekeeper, loving wife, and church leader, is even more puzzling when we learn that what's beneath is not all that shocking: she lies, she's promiscuous, she's a perfectionist, and she spends too much money. The mystery is the motive in this tale of a murderer, both of whose husbands died, in bed, of "accidents with guns." Jerry Bledsoe has a crisp, unemotional prose style. His expertly paced courtroom cliffhangers kept this reviewer up reading long past midnight. Before He Wakes was a finalist for the 1995 Edgar Award in Fact Crime.

From Publishers Weekly
In 1988, high school coach Russ Stager of Durham, N.C., was "accidentally" killed by his wife, Barbara, shot with a loaded gun he allegedly kept under his pillow. A seemingly happy and popular couple, both active in their church, the two were compulsive overspenders--and she was a sexual overachiever with a string of extramarital affairs. As the case developed, it became clear she was a liar and a thief as well. Then detectives discovered that exactly 10 years earlier Barbara's first husband, Larry Ford, had died in an identical fashion but police had done nothing about their reservations concerning that "accident." Barbara was convicted of murder and eventually sentenced to life. . . ."


I interviewed her. Yikes! The SBI requested every scrap of paper concerning her and I had to go up into the attic and pull old boxes of applications to find hers. What a mess.

Everyone was thoroughly shocked!

[seemunkee]

18. Samual Sheinbein - Murderer that ran away to Israel

Claimed Israeli citizenship to prevent being deported and started a big international incident. His parents were freinds with my in-laws.

[Vinca]

19. Audrey Hilley, the "Black Widow."

In the early 1980's I was a cop and I had to guard her one evening while she was in transit from one jail to another. She was actually a very nice person. It was hard to imagine she was a notorious murderer.

[IndianaJones]

20. OJ at spring break in 1992. Pete Rose at a Winn Dixie in Boca. nt.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

34. You saw Pete Rose at Winn Dixie in Boca?

I saw Pete Rose at Sports Authority in Boca!

[5thGenDemocrat]

21. Alabama Governor George Wallace

When I was 15, Randy Burtt and I skipped school and shook his hand during a 1972 campaign rally at Tri-City Airport, near Saginaw, MI. This was a few days before he got capped in Laurel, MD. He was a demagogue, but also one hell of a politician.
John
Shocked the hell out of me when Arthur Bremer shot him -- turned out he'd been in the same crowd we were.

[long_green]

22. There was this soft-spoken guy at a place we went for summer

vacation. Very granola. He loved to hike and one time I sat on his lap while he read stories to me. His name was Jonathan. Many years later my mom told me that Jonathan killed his elderly mother with an axe. Oh, after he read stories to me.

[matcom]

23. Reagan

he signed a baseball for me when I was 12.

still have the nightmares :scared:

[flvegan]

24. Rodney Coronado

We participated in an animal rights conference as speakers and then on a Q&A Forum. Matter of fact, for the forum he asked me to sit next to him and thanked me for what I had done (the subject of my presentation).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Coronado

[KamaAina]

25. Norma "Jane Roe" McCorvey

outside an abortion rights protest at the La. Capitol in Baton Rouge, early '90s. I thought it quite odd that she was off to one side, by herself, no one else around her.

Turns out this was just before she went over to the Dark Side, having been converted personally by Operation Oppress-You's own (I kid you not) Rev. Flip Benham. :puke:

[jpak]

26. Ralph Reed

as a student...

[Burma Jones]

27. Kenneth Starr

In a bakery in McLean, VA

I told him that he blew any chance he ever had of sitting on the federal bench......

[zingaro]

29. Charlton Heston.

:rofl: Does he count?

[bluethruandthru]

30. Sean Hannity

:puke:

[Starbucks Anarchist]

31. George W. Bush.

I was living in Texas at the time, a freshman in high school, and he was visiting during his gubernatorial run.

I have his autograph somewhere. :rofl:

[Writer]

33. When I was an undergrad in Austin ten or so years ago...

I met a man while working at the local textbook store. He was in his 40's, with a wife and daughter. We began to chat politics, and he lectured me vociferously that gun control laws were unnecessary and an infringement of his rights.

Several months later I heard from other employees that he took a gun, shot his wife and child, then killed himself. I don't remember his name, but I will never forget him.

~Writer~

[semillama]

35. Dr. Jack Kevorkian

Streets of Pontiac, about 1994 or so. He was out getting signatures for a petition to legalize euthanasia with his lawyer (and future Democratic gubernatorial candidate) Geoffrey Fieger. I shook his hand. He's very tiny.

[av8rdave]

36. Newt Gingrich

[kwassa]

37. I forgot! I used to see O.J. Simpson fairly often.

O.J. liked being a public celebrity, too.

We banked at the same bank in Brentwood, CA. It was the one where Nicole kept her safe deposit box, too. The restaurant that Ron Goldman worked at was a couple blocks away, Nicole's condo within a mile or so on Bundy.

I also got stuck behind him in gridlock traffic in Westwood. I was in my litle shitbox of a car, he in a red Ferrari Testarossa, the first I had ever seen.

edit to add: this was the years before the murders, of course.

[tigereye]

38. Lou Reed?

I nodded to Mick Jagger when he walked into a movie theater 1 foot away from me. I don't think that counts though. ;)

[RedSpartan]

39. John Ashcroft

I was sworn into the DC bar next to him in 2006.

[Flaxbee]

41. G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North

My friend's mother was an administrator at a southern California college and he was there debating one of the professors. Friend's mother (who is very liberal) introduced us. Professor had better points (obviously), but Liddy was a much better speaker.

Oliver North in the checkout line next to mine at a CostCo in Virginia. Took me a minute or two to figure out why he looked familiar, and why all these guys kept walking up to him shaking his hand. Blech.

[Bennyboy]

42. Squeaky Froome

And Sandra Goode from the Manson Family. they used to hang out in a house next to the Community garden in downtown Sacramento. They used to come into the garden, pick it clean and do no work. They would be, "it comes from the ground, it is of the earth, it is God's and it is ours".....

[Taverner]

44. I have met GW Bush

Not for long, and he wasn't even Gov of Texas at the time. He smiled a lot. Didn't say much. Methinks Rove was not in love with him yet.

[CBHagman]

45. I saw Anne Perry but didn't meet her.

The mystery novelist Anne Perry (born Juliet Hulme) was signing books at a store where I worked. I suspect everyone on the staff thought the same thing: Here we are in the room with an actual murderer. :scared:

She was businesslike and quiet, I thought, but I didn't approach her.

Here's the scoop on her background:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Perry

I have met Strom Thurmond and Bob Packwood, not that I would lump either of them together with an honest-to-goodness murderer. Still, they committed sins of their own.

[Dulcinea]

46. Pat Robertson.

In 1988, when he was running for president.

Even more evil & creepy in person, surrounded by flunkies.

[blitzen]

47. I worked side-by-side with a serial killer...

a nice guy, kind of quiet. Worked with him in a fruit cannery, putting berries into 30 lb. tins.