Number 9 Andrew Hennells
Roughly 15 minutes before robbing a Tesco supermarket in King’s Lynn, England,
Andrew Hennells posted his plans on Facebook. On February the 13th of 2015, Hennells wrote “Doing.
Tesco. Over” prior to walking into the store and brandishing a knife while demanding cash from the
store’s staff. The authorities were contacted but Hennells fled the scene with hundreds of pounds
in stolen cash. He was, however, arrested shortly thereafter at a nearby pub. Officers recovered
the stolen money and also found a knife in his possession. The Facebook post, coupled
with witness reports and the material evidence on Hennells’ person irrefutably pointed to him as the
perpetrator. He pleaded guilty to armed robbery a few months later and a judge concluded he posed
“a high risk of serious harm to the public”. Hennells was sentenced to four years in prison.
Number 8 Julio César Castillo In August of 2021, a man was gunned down
by an intruder in the living room of his Carolina residence, in Puerto Rico, while he was streaming
live on Facebook. 24-year-old Julio César Castillo, a native of the Dominican Republic,
was drinking a bottle of alcohol and recording himself in the moments leading up to the
shooting. The masked gunman barged inside the room and unleashed a flurry of shots,
prompting Castillo to run and then crawl for his life. The attacker fired five times before
fleeing, wounding another male occupant of the home, reported as being in his late teens,
in the process. The latter survived but Castillo was pronounced dead at a local hospital. According
to updates on the case, the authorities hadn’t disclosed the name of any suspects. It’s unclear
what had prompted the shooting, although some sources have theorized it to have been retaliatory
in nature. La Colonia El Cedro Miches, a Dominican Republic news outlet, reported that Castillo had
fled to Puerto Rico on a raft a few months prior. He’d done so after allegedly killing a young woman
in the Miches neighborhood La Boca del Río. Number 7 Facebook Killer
At around 2:00 pm, on April the 16th of 2017, Robert Goodwin Sr. was approached by a man as
he was walking in the Glenville neighborhood of Cleveland. Steve Stephens, aged 37, exited his car
and asked Goodwin to say the name of a woman with whom Stephens had been romantically involved.
He then told 74-year-old Goodwin “She’s the reason why this is about to happen to you” before
fatally shooting him. In the immediate aftermath, Stephens uploaded a graphic video of the killing
to Facebook. A state-wide manhunt was launched, in which local authorities received support from
the FBI. By the morning of April the 17th, the search for Stephens expanded to Michigan, Indiana,
Pennsylvania and New York, with a $50,000 reward offered for information and residents being told
to be on high alert. Multiple media outlets had dubbed him the “Facebook Killer” while the social
media website would later be criticized because the horrific video was publicly available on the
shooter’s page for over 2 hours. The authorities learned that Stephens had told his mother on the
phone that he’d started shooting people because he was angry at his girlfriend. 74-year-old Goodwin
had been randomly selected while the girlfriend in question was unharmed and cooperated with
the authorities. On April the 18th, Stephens pulled into a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, about
100 miles from where the shooting had occurred. An employee recognized him from news reports and,
after alerting the authorities, deliberately stalled him by claiming his order of fries
would be late. Pennsylvania State Police arrived at the restaurant and a chase ensued as Stephens
pulled out of the drive thru. Officers performed a tactical maneuver and brought his car to a stop
in the city of Erie. As they closed in on Stephens’ vehicle, he took his own
life via gunshot to the head. Number 6 Jessica Ann Smith
In the fall of 2019, a Pennsylvania woman was arrested for faking cancer in order to collects
donations, amounting to thousands of dollars, through campaigns on Facebook and GoFundMe.
31-year-old Jessica Ann Smith, from Chester County, had started the campaigns in June,
alleging that her battle with colon cancer had left her unable to work and provide
for her children, in addition to exorbitant medical bills. On Facebook, the campaign named
#FightLikeAJessica made similar claims. Smith took advantage of people’s generosity and collected
over $10,000 from the two fundraisers which she’d operated under her maiden name, Jessica Veronica
Cornell. She’d also forged several documents to give validity to her claims. On July the 31st,
the woman’s husband, Robert, reported her to the authorities, telling them that his wife wasn’t a
cancer sufferer. He’d overheard her talking on the phone to a representative for her employer, asking
for time off for cancer treatments. Robert also provided bank statements from their joint account,
showing a pattern of deposits. Smith was arrested and charged with theft
by deception and other theft-related counts. Number 5 Tony Harris
In October of 2015, three masked and armed intruders broke into the Kingsessing,
Philadelphia, home of 50-year-old Tony Harris, demanding to know where the money was. They placed
a gun to the head of the man’s fiancée, Amber Crane, who told them that they didn’t have any
cash and that they were a “poor family”. One of the intruders then shot Harris in the head
before fleeing the scene along with the others. The victim was rushed to the Hospital of the
University of Pennsylvania, where he ultimately succumbed to the gunshot wound. Investigators
believed that a Facebook post had been responsible for the fatal home invasion. On October the 5th,
Harris had uploaded a photo of Crane holding thick bundles of cash. The father-of-three’s caption
read that he’d misplaced $60,000 and that he hoped his wife hadn’t gone shopping with it. The large
sum of money is believed to have attracted the robbers and the authorities began investigating
a possible connection. However, according to the victim’s family, the post was meant as a
joke. They claimed that Harris, an electronics repairman, had placed $20 at the top of stacks
that mostly consisted of $1 bills making them seem far more valuable than they actually were.
Number 4 Alexandria Lyons In 2020, at the time of the street
demonstrations related to the death of George Floyd, a woman from Grand Rapids, Michigan,
was accused of using social media to incite a riot. 22-year-old Alexandria Lyons posted
a Facebook Live video in which she encouraged others to loot and cause destruction. In the
footage she was drinking beer that had allegedly been stolen from a local establishment called
Mojo’s Dueling Piano Bar & Restaurant. Lyons also uploaded footage of a house party at her residence
in which clothing looted from a local store was displayed. The young woman was arraigned
on June the 2nd on charges of inciting a riot and malicious destruction of property,
felonies punishable by 10 and 5 years in prison respectively. She pleaded guilty to the first
charge in November of 2021, with her sentencing scheduled for early January of the following year.
Number 3 Facebook Murders In 2012, a Tennessee couple
was found dead at their home in Mountain City, following a murder plot that unfolded on Facebook,
involving catfishing and cyberbullying. Jenelle Potter along with her parents, Barbara and Marvin,
had moved to the city in 2005. Jenelle, then in her early 20s, faced difficulty interacting
socially, not least of all because of her overprotective parents, and spent most of her time
on social media. In the late 2000s, for the first time, she found a group of real-life friends that
included Billy Payne and his cousin, Jamie Curd. Jenelle became romantically involved with Curd
but kept the relationship hidden from her parents while also reportedly secretly harboring an
obsession for Payne. The relationship with the latter would deteriorate after he’d begun dating
Billie Jean Hayworth. Jenelle accused Payne and Hayworth of anonymously bullying her online,
threatening her with violence and making crank calls. She maintained that the hate was rooted
in Hayworth being jealous of her looks. The couple unfriended her on Facebook, claiming that Janelle
had, in fact, been the feud’s main aggressor. On January the 31st of 2012, a neighbor found
36-year-old Payne and Hayworth, aged 23, dead at their home. Both had been executed,
in a manner indicative of a professional hitman, via single gunshots to the head. Payne’s throat
had also been slit while Hayworth had been gunned down as she held their son, 7-month-old Tyler,
in her arms. The child was found covered in his mother’s blood but otherwise unharmed. There was
limited evidence at the scene and thus local authorities followed up on the Facebook feud.
They interviewed Curd who, after failing a polygraph, asked them why the CIA was involved.
It emerged that, around the time that Payne and Hayworth had gotten engaged, Curd and Jenelle’s
parents had started talking to a purported CIA agent, only identifying himself as Chris, online.
Hundreds of messages were exchanged in which Chris had told them it was his duty to protect
Jenelle from the couple. Curd, Barbara and Marvin conspired to kill them with Marvin, an ex-Marine,
acting as the triggerman. It then emerged that Chris and Jenelle were the same person as she’d
successfully tricked the others into eliminating her supposed bullies. Curd was sentenced to 25
years in prison while all three members of the Potter family received life sentences.
Number 2 Christopher Banegas A New Mexico man was taken into police custody,
in November of 2014, after uploading pictures of stolen guns to his Facebook profile. The weapons
had been taken from an Albuquerque home in the fall of the previous year by Christopher Banegas,
a father in his late 30s. The police had no leads regarding the theft until the victim, who was a
friend of Banegas’, recognized his property from the Facebook posts. He hadn’t previously checked
up on Banegas or viewed his profile because he didn’t suspect him. In the aftermath,
the thief was charged with aggravated burglary, larceny of a firearm, and tampering with evidence.
Number 1 Derek Medina
In 2016, a Miami judge sentenced 33-year-old South Florida man Derek Medina to life in prison
for killing his wife. The incident, which took place in November of 2013, had begun as a domestic
dispute during the course of which 27-year-old Jennifer Alfonso had started striking Medina with
her fists. Glimpses of the fight were captured by the home’s interior surveillance cameras.
Prosecutors would later argue that the man, who weighed roughly 200 pounds on a 6-foot frame,
could’ve easily overpowered the much smaller Alfonso without shooting her. Nevertheless,
Medina retrieved his handgun from an upstairs bedroom and fired eight rounds into his wife.
A medical examiner concluded that all of the shots had occurred as the victim was cowering
on her on knees, on the kitchen floor. Medina then took a photo of her body and uploaded it
to Facebook captioning it “RIP Jennifer Alfonso”. As shocked friends asked about the harrowing post,
Medina confessed to killing his wife because she was punching him and he couldn’t “stand
anymore of the abuse”. He then surrendered to the authorities.
During his trial, Medina addressed the court in a manner that seemed rather disconnected from
his situation, warning President Barack Obama about corruption and vowing to “sue the world”.
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