CHILLING HALLOWEEN CRIMES

As fright night gets closer, we take a look at the real-life horror stories...

- LOUISE BATY

It’s time for fans of all things spooky to pull out their devil horns and celebrate their favourite night of the year. Children dressed as pumpkins and ghosts excitedly bang on neighbours’ doors for sweet treats, and friends get together for raucous fun at Halloween parties – what’s not to like?

But scratch the light-hearted surface and a worrying statistic reveals that crime levels spike over the Halloween period, with property theft and vandalism seeing an increase. Additionally, police records from the past 50 years list a sickening roster of gruesome real-life crimes to shock even the most hardened horror movie fans. From the evil Candy Man who poisoned his own child with trick-or-treat sweets to the ‘killer clown craze’ that wreaked panic on a global scale, Woman’s Own looks at some infamous cases.

House of horrors

When Devon Griffin, 16, stumbled across the blood-soaked bodies of his mum and stepdad in their bedroom in Ohio, on 31 October 2010, for a second he thought it was a Halloween prank. Tragically, Susan and William Liske had been shot to death. The body of Devon’s brother Derek, 23, was found in his bedroom, with a blunt-force trauma head wound. There were no signs of forced entry or a robbery. So who had killed the family, and why? When detectives learnt William’s son from a previous marriage, BJ Liske, 24, had always hated Susan, he became the main suspect and was tracked down to a cabin in the woods, where a rifle was found in his van. After pleading guilty to the triple murder, he was sentenced to three life sentences without parole – but died by suicide behind bars in 2015.