9. NATHANIEL FUJITA & LAUREN ASTLEY
Lauren Astley was just 18 years old when her life was tragically cut short
at the hands of her high school sweetheart Nate Fujita. The couple had just graduated
from Wayland High School in Massachusetts and had recently broken up after dating for several years.
Fujita strangled and stabbed Lauren to death in July of 2011,
and then discarded her body in a remote marsh near her home. Police charged him with
first-degree murder, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, and assault and batttery.
During the trial, prosecutors argued that Fujita’s rage over the break-up motivated him to kill
Lauren. He was convicted of first-degree murder and is serving a life sentence for the crime.
Ten years after the horrifying ordeal, Lauren’s family still grapples with the grief that Fujita’s
actions have caused. Speaking with Bob Ward from Boston 25 News, her father, Malcolm Astley, said:
“The most dangerous time is break-ups in relationships, or the day of a divorce.”
In their beloved daughter’s memory, the family created the Lauren Astley Memorial Fund,
which aims to educate students about healthy and unhealthy relationships,
signs of trouble to watch for, and how to seek help.
8. WILLIAM GAUL & EMMA JANE WALKER
William Gaul was a college football player from Knoxville, Tennessee
who had a bright future ahead of him. But the 18-year-old robbed himself of any life
opportunities when he decided that if he couldn’t have his ex-girlfriend in his life, nobody could.
Sixteen-year-old Emma Jane Walker, a cheerleader at their local high school,
broke up with William in 2016. But he couldn’t accept that she wanted to go
on with her life without him. Instead of moving on, the irate teenager shot her
while she slept in her bedroom. Her body was discovered early the next morning.
Detectives quickly zeroed in on William as their prime suspect.
Worried that he would try to destroy evidence, they immediately began to keep an eye on him.
He was soon taken into custody on a slew of charges related to Emma’s death.
In 2018, a jury found the defendant guilty of stalking, theft, tampering with evidence,
reckless endangerment, possession of a firearm during the commission of a dangerous felony,
and felony murder. But just as William didn’t want to accept the break-up with Emma,
he disapproves of the jury’s decision and has requested a retrial. His request was denied
based on a lack of evidence justifying the alleged need to revisit the case in court.
7. MIKE & DENISE WILLIAMS
Mike and Denise Williams had plans to celebrate their wedding anniversary together in 2000,
but Mike never returned from a duck hunting trip on time to celebrate. His friends and
family formed a search party, which included his best friend Brian Winchester and Brian’s dad.
The pair found Mike’s motorized canoe and Ford Bronco abandoned in Lake Seminole, Florida.
His hunting license, jacket, and waders were found at the bottom of the lake,
leading detectives to wonder if the man had been eaten by alligators.
Eighteen years later, Mike’s wife and high school sweetheart, Denise, stood trial for
his murder. In an odd twist of events, Brian took the stand and confessed to fatally shooting Mike
so that he and Denise could be together. The illicit couple had co-conspired to kill their
victim after Brian, who was an insurance agent by trade, wrote up a $1.75 million policy on Mike.
Brian then divorced his high school sweetheart, Kathy, and married Denise in 2005.
Mike’s disappearance went unsolved for some time before investigators decided to put the suspects
in front of a jury, arguing that he was fatally shot and that the killers tried to make his death
look accidental. All along, Denise’s attorneys have argued that she played a minimal role
in her former husband’s murder. But she was nevertheless convicted of first-degree murder.
In 2018, Denise’s conviction was vacated, forcing the court to re-address her case.
Thankfully, she was resentenced, and will have to serve 30 years for her role in Mike’s death.
Brian is serving a 20-year sentence after avoiding harsher punishment by testifying against Denise.
While Denise continues to deny having any role in the crime,
Brian has expressed remorse for killing his best friend.
6. THE ‘CADET KILLERS’
David Graham and Diane Zamora started dating in their senior year of high school in 1995.
After a track meet later that year, David gave his teammate Adrianne Jones a ride home, and the
two allegedly had sex. Diane could immediately tell something was off about David’s behavior,
and he confessed to the encounter about a month later. He later claimed that his
irate girlfriend demanded that he kill Adrianne.
The pair hatched a sick plot for David to invite Adrianne to go for a drive
while Diane hid in the back of his car. She took the bait. David parked next to a reservoir, where
Diane came out of hiding and confronted Adrianne about the cheating incident. Adrianne reportedly
admitted to having sex with David, but said that she didn’t enjoy it because she felt guilty.
The apologetic admission apparently wasn’t good enough for Diane, who became enraged
and attacked Adrianne. The victim managed to escape the car and fled on foot, but her efforts
were no match for the 9 millimeter handgun that David used to fire two bullets into her head.
Adrianne’s body was discovered shortly after the murder, but police were baffled for months
as they attempted to identify a suspect. In the meantime,
Diane and David got engaged, graduated high school, and joined the military.
They were sent to different academies, but promised to stay faithful to one another.
Nearly a year after the murder, Diane confessed to her roommates, who went to the police.
Both she and David were taken in for questioning and admitted to the crime.
The Jones family requested that prosecutors avoid seeking the death penalty, landing both defendants
a life sentence with eligibility for parole after 40 years. If only they had thought about
their futures, they would have probably decided to forget about the teenage love triangle altogether.
Have you ever been in a complicated love triangle? Let us know in the comments below
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5. RAY & DOMINIQUE FARRIA
Those closest to Ray and Dominique Farria knew the high school sweethearts as a loving
and affectionate couple. They got married in 2006 and raised four children together in New Orleans.
Like any couple, the pair occasionally argued, according to Ray’s mother, Szerret Faria, who
lived with her son and his wife. But she never saw any violence between the two until one day in
2018, when Ray clung to the hood of Dominique’s car as she drove a half-mile (0.8 km) down the
road with the kids inside. He eventually jumped off and shot at the car, firing a bullet through
the windshield and into Dominique’s neck. She was rushed to the hospital, where she died from her
injuries. The children, who were between one and 11 years old at the time, were not hurt.
Police charged Ray with second-degree murder,
obstruction of justice, and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
The ordeal was heartbreaking for his mother, who spoke with Nola.com shortly after the killing.
In her own words, Szerret said “Those two were inseparable.
That’s why this hurts. I don’t know why this happened.”
Dominique’s aunt, Linda Garrus, told the news outlet that she didn’t know of any
major problems between the couple, adding “Why would you take this woman away from her kids?
Now, they don’t have a mother or a father.”
Ray pleaded guilty to manslaughter and several other charges in 2019 and was sentenced to 80
years in prison. But this didn’t exactly bring closure to the couple’s loved ones,
who struggled to make sense of what happened.
Speaking with local station 4WWL, Dominique’s long-time friend, Janel Blackwell, offered a
sobering summary of the tragedy, stating: “Everybody’s at a loss, nobody wins here.”
4. TIM HACK & KELLY DREW
Tim Hack and Kelly Drew grew up in the same quiet community in southeastern Wisconsin.
He was a farmer and she went to beauty school. Everyone thought the couple would get married,
have children, and grow old together, but these visions of a happy life were
crushed when the 19-year-olds vanished from a wedding reception in 1980.
Their decomposing bodies were found two months later just a few miles
from where they disappeared. Someone had stabbed and strangled the couple to death,
leaving detectives perplexed for the next 30 years as they struggled to identify a suspect
in the puzzling case, which became known as the “Sweetheart Murders.”
DNA technology proved to be a game-changer in solving the tragic slaying. In 2009, investigators
matched DNA from the crime scene to a 76-year-old Kentucky resident named Edward W. Edwards,
who was working at the wedding reception venue as a handyman when Tim and Kelly were murdered.
He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder; and, as it turned out, these were just
a few of the many murders Edwards committed throughout his lifetime. The serial killer took
at least five lives between 1977 and 1996, and is suspected of additional murders. Edwards was
sentenced to death by lethal injection, but died in prison in 2011 from natural causes.
3. NICK KUNSELMAN & STEPHANIE HART-GRIZZELL
Since 1999, households across the U.S. have known about Columbine High School
in Littleton, Colorado, where two troubled teens went on a violent shooting spree.
People are less familiar with a tragedy that occurred on Valentine’s Day the following year,
when two students were gunned down in a local Subway restaurant.
An employee entered the business after driving by and noticing that the lights were still
on after business hours. They found the bodies of 15-year-old Nick Kunselman
and 16-year-old Stephanie Hart-Grizzell behind the counter. Nick worked at the restaurant,
and Stephanie was there, waiting for him to finish his shift, when someone shot the couple to death.
Twenty-two years later, the case remains unsolved. Rumors that the
murders were drug-related have never been proven.
Detectives believe that someone out there has key information that could help bring the killer
to justice. Last year, on the 21st anniversary of the slayings, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s
Office appealed to the public on Facebook, urging anyone who knows anything to come forward so that
they can finally bring closure to the case. There is a $100,000 reward for information
leading to the arrest of a suspect, who police describe as a young white man with blonde hair.
2. JENNIFER & JAMES FAITH
Forty-eight-year-old Jennifer Faith and her 49-year-old husband, James,
were walking their dog in late 2020 in their Dallas, Texas neighborhood
when someone shot James several times. He died in the street in a pool of blood
after receiving three bullets to the head, three to the chest, and one to the pelvis.
Jennifer told police that after the attacker killed her husband, they bound her wrists with
duct tape and tried to steal her jewelry. She said she didn’t recognize the suspect, who wore
a hoodie and a face mask. Witnesses noticed that he drove a black Nissan pick-up truck.
The tragically widowed wife went on the local news and pleaded for anyone with information,
or for the killer themselves, to come forward. She described James as the backbone of their family
and said that she hoped the murderer could understand the gravity of what they had done
and feel guilty enough to turn themselves in.
Detectives soon discovered that Jennifer had been communicating with her high school sweetheart,
Darrin Rubin Lopez, around the time of her husband’s murder.
The pair had lost touch years earlier when Lopez joined the military
and was sent to South Korea. But they evidently reconnected,
and had exchanged over 14,000 text messages in the weeks leading up to James’s murder.
The messages contained plans to kill Jennifer’s husband and had been deleted in an attempt to
hide them from investigators. But they managed to recover the conversations, which pointed
toward the pair as their main suspects. Darrin has pleaded “not guilty” to charges of murder
and transporting a weapon over state lines to commit a felony. Jennifer pleaded guilty to
a federal murder-for-hire charge and is awaiting sentencing, which could include the death penalty.
1. BRIAN & KELLY SUE ROBINETTE
High school sweethearts Brian and Kelly Sue Robinette established a comfortable life in
Ellicott City, Maryland, where they raised a son and a daughter. They managed to provide their kids
with all the trappings of a middle-class lifestyle,
taking them on beach vacations and sending them to college.
Brian, who worked as a pharmacist, was 58 years old when he began thinking about retiring.
He and Kelly were close with their relatives and planned to stay in the area. But the couple’s
future was ripped away from them last year when someone shot them to death inside their home.
Police embarked on a manhunt for Brian’s 46-year-old estranged half-brother, Jeffrey
Burnham, who had killed their mother’s 83-year-old friend, Rebecca Reynolds, and stole her SUV before
driving to the Robinettes’ home and murdering them. After gunning down Brian and Kelly,
Jeffrey took off in their red Corvette. He was captured 18 hours later in West Virginia
after telling a local firefighter that he had been “forced” to kill three people.
According to court documents, Jeffrey disapproved of Brian’s career as a pharmacist,
particularly because it involved administering COVID-19 vaccines.
He allegedly told someone that his half-brother was “killing people with the COVID shot.”
The couple’s friends and family were left in shock as they tried to understand why Jeffrey would
murder someone he barely associated with. He faces numerous charges, including murder and car theft.
Thanks for watching! If you’d like to hear more shocking tales of high school sweethearts gone
wrong, let us know in the comments below, and be sure to subscribe. See you next time, bye! :)