Number 8 Incidents in Antarctica For six months, leading up to October of 2018,
Sergey Savitsky and Oleg Beloguzov, both in their 50s, had been working together at the
Bellingshausen Station, on King George Island, off the coast of Antarctica.
Savitsky worked as an electrical engineer while Beloguzov was a welder at the research
station.
Tensions between the two men grew with one reported reason being that Beloguzov was constantly
spoiling the endings of books that Savitsky was checking out of the station library.
The dispute reached a boiling point on October the 9th, when an intoxicated Savitsky stabbed
his coworker multiple times in the chest.
The violent reaction was also described as stemming from an emotional breakdown, presumably
caused by being confined to a small space for a prolonged period of time.
Beloguzov was airlifted to a hospital in Chile and eventually recovered while Savitsky surrendered
to the station manager.
At the legal proceedings, in Russia, Beloguzov was ultimately forgiving of Savitsky after
he’d expressed remorse, and ultimately proposed the case to be dropped, which it was.
While the most recent, it was one of only a handful of criminal incidents to have occurred
in Antarctica.
The first reported one dates back to 1959, at the Vostok Station, in Princess Elizabeth
Land.
Two researchers were playing a game of chess when one of them, enraged that he’d lost,
attacked the other with an ice axe.
It’s unclear if the victim recovered or not but, following a KGB investigation, chess
was banned across all stations by the Antarctic Soviet.
Number 7 Kenneth Saal On June the 10th of 2019, Carolyn Byington
was found dead at her apartment, in Plainsboro, New Jersey.
The alarm was raised by coworkers at a Princeton marketing firm, after 26-year-old Byington
had failed to return from her lunch break.
Byington had been brutally stabbed to death but, at first, the authorities had no lead
on a suspect.
Coinciding with the woman’s lunch break was that of her coworker, 30-year-old Kenneth
Saal, who told his supervisor he’d be late because he needed to get his car repaired.
His demeanor, after returning from the break and in the days that followed, began to change.
A number of coworkers noticed cuts on his hands and knuckles while his story about getting
his car fixed was revealed to have been a lie.
He’d even reportedly asked a coworker if he could get arrested on “circumstantial
evidence alone”.
Both Saal and Byington had been hired at the firm in 2016 and it’s believed, at some
point, he’d developed an obsession for her.
Neighbors reported seeing Saal at the apartment complex in the weeks leading up to her death.
Google location services also placed him at the scene.
Saal was connected to the slaying after DNA material, recovered from under the victim’s
fingernails, couldn’t conclusively exclude him.
It’s believed that he’d been waiting for Byington at her apartment and that he ambushed
her when she entered.
Neighbors reported hearing faint screams and the sound of furniture being moved around
but hadn’t realized an attack was occurring.
Saal, a father-of-one, was charged with first-degree murder and possession of a weapon for an unlawful
purpose, but he denied killing Byington.
According to subsequent updates on the case, the “Lunch Break Killer” was offered a
plea deal of 30 years.
Number 6 Accident at Chinese Factory In February of 2019, security footage from
a factory in Yidu, in the Chinese province of Hubei, started circulating online and showed
a horrific workplace accident.
An unnamed forewoman was directing a truck when she was suddenly scooped from behind
by a loader.
The driver was reportedly distracted by his cellphone and hadn’t seen her.
With the woman still trapped inside, he plunged the bucket into a pile of sand.
He then turned the loader to deposit the material into a compactor.
The vibrating machinery was used to crush stones and sandy soil into uniform particles.
Shortly after releasing the bucket into the compactor, the driver saw his coworker’s
body flailing at the top.
He raised the alarm and others rushed in to save her but it was too late.
She was later pronounced dead with asphyxiation identified as the main cause.
Number 5 Lee Rodarte Jr In August of 2017, Savannah Gold arrived at
her workplace, the Bonefish Grill, in Jacksonville, Florida, but never made it into the building.
The 21-year-old’s car was found, unlocked, in the parking lot.
Her purse was in the front seat while the vehicle’s tires were slashed.
Gold was in an on-again, off-again relationship with coworker and culinary manager, Lee Rodarte
Jr., aged 30.
Surveillance footage would show her arriving in the parking lot, at 5:35 pm.
She then got into Rodarte’s vehicle, on the passenger side, and, about a quarter of
an hour later, what appeared to be a struggle ensued.
Rodarte then briefly walked over to Gold’s vehicle before driving off with her still
in his car.
Within a few hours, Gold’s friends and family started receiving messages that she’d met
“a really great guy” and that they were running away together.
Her family instantly became suspicious as the messages weren’t written in a tone matching
Gold’s and the spelling was, as her brother put it, “all whacked out”.
Following her disappearance, Rodarte assisted her relatives with the search and even handed
out missing person flyers.
Upon being questioned by the police, however, his story crumbled and he confessed to killing
Gold in his car and then disposing of her body in a nearby lake.
Divers later recovered her remains.
The motive remains a mystery, although Rodarte claimed self-defense and that Gold had attacked
him first.
He ultimately pled guilty to second-degree murder, in 2021, and was sentenced to 40 years
in prison.
Number 4 Murder of Keiauna Lynette Davis In February of 2018, a Pennsylvania woman
was shot and killed during a robbery that had been orchestrated by her coworker.
27-year-old Keiauna Lynette Davis had told others at the Wilkinsburg Dollar Store, where
she worked, about a $7,000 tax refund that she was expecting.
Hearing about the mother-of-two’s good fortune, coworker Laya Alana Whitley, aged 21, contrived
a plan to steal her money.
To that end she sought the help of accomplices Dane James Taylor and Kaijin Xavier Scott,
both in their early 20s.
During Davis’ lunch break, her grandmother brought her $3,000 in cash.
Whitley saw the exchange and set the plan in motion by texting Taylor.
He got a ride from Scott and, shortly after 2:30, the two followed Davis, in a Toyota
Corolla, as she was walking on the street.
They pulled up in front of her and a masked Taylor got out, threatened Davis with a handgun
and demanded the money.
She begged him to stop, claiming she didn’t have it.
Taylor fired two shots at Davis and, while the first one missed, the second went through
her hip.
She would later succumb to the gunshot injury at a local hospital.
Investigators used surveillance footage and eyewitness testimonies to trace the Corolla
back to Scott, who subsequently confessed to the entire plot.
Scott’s sentence remained to be determined.
Whitley and Taylor both accepted plea deals and were given sentences of 20 to 50 and 30
to 60 years in prison, respectively.
Number 3 Tangela Parker In July of 2021, following a six month manhunt,
a woman and her husband were arrested in Arizona, for a fatal shooting at a furniture plant
in North Carolina.
The incident had occurred in January after Phelifia Marlow and coworker Tangela Parker,
both in their early 50s, got into an argument about moving tables in the work area.
The former’s husband told a media outlet that she’d been bullied by Parker.
Other workers at the plant claimed the woman had a reputation for being aggressive and
argumentative.
Marlow filled a complaint and, in the dispute’s aftermath, Parker was suspended for three
days.
She returned to the plant, on the afternoon of January the 13th, and opened fire on Marlow.
The authorities were called to the scene and the plant went on lockdown.
The victim was taken to a local hospital where she was later pronounced dead, from multiple
gunshot injuries.
Parker and her husband, 62-year-old Eric, then went on the run.
They ultimately settled in Phoenix, where, for several months they lived out of their
Honda CR-V, after having changed its license plates.
They survived by begging for money and panhandling before finding a job at a horse ranch.
After an investigation, spanning eight states and combing through dozens of leads, the couple
was found and arrested.
Parker was charged with first-degree murder and her husband was charged as an accessory
after-the-fact.
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Number 2 Christopher Dillard On April the 19th of 2017, in the early hours
of the morning, the body of 24-year-old Nicole Gland was found behind the Upper Deck Lounge,
in Chesterton, Illinois, where she worked as a bartender.
She’d bled out in her SUV after sustaining over 20 stab wounds.
The culprit was later identified as 51-year-old Christopher Dillard, a bouncer at the bar.
When first questioned, he confessed to officers that he’d killed Gland after she’d refused
his advances, also mentioning that he’d been doing drugs “for days”.
However, those statements were thrown out when Dillard’s defense argued that the officers
had violated his constitutional rights by continuing to question him even after he’d
requested an attorney.
However, in a jailhouse phone call to his longtime girlfriend he seemed eager to confess
and told her that “it was the drugs” while in another conversation Dillard said that
he’d “messed up bad”.
A judge considered the phone calls admissible as Dillard had been informed they were being
recorded.
While he didn’t outright confess to the killing, the conversations weighed heavily
in front of a jury.
Dillard was found guilty and sentenced to 65 years in prison.
Number 1 Klaus O In 2018, at a metal fittings company in Schloss
Holte-Stukenbrock, Germany, an unnamed worker took out his sandwich, during the lunch break,
and found that it had a white powder on it.
He became suspicious when, the following day, the same substance appeared on another sandwich.
The worker took the matter up with the company’s management and a hidden camera was installed
in the break room.
It would later capture a worker, identified only as Klaus O. in accordance to German privacy
laws, as he took food and drinks out of his colleagues’ bags then covered them with
dust before meticulously placing them back.
Tests would later reveal the substance to have been acetate, which is almost tasteless
and can severely impact organ health.
57-year-old machinist Klaus had been working at the company for over 30 years and had always
kept to himself.
When the police searched his home they found a makeshift laboratory where he’d been experimenting
with a number of heavy metals, including cadmium, lead and mercury.
Ultimately, two colleagues had suffered severe kidney problems and one had sustained brain
damage that left him in a vegetative state, unlikely to recover.
However, those incidents were recorded only since Klaus had been discovered.
The police launched an investigation into 21 deaths, of former employees at the company,
of which Klaus may have been responsible.
He kept quiet throughout most of his trial and never commented on his motives.
A psychologist who’d spoken to him claimed that Klaus approached the matter like a researcher,
interested in observing how his colleagues would be affected by the toxins.
The psychologist was quoted as saying that Klaus "seemed like a scientist who was testing
substances on a guinea pig".
He was charged with attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison.
The sentence was uncharacteristically harsh for the German legal system but Klaus was
identified as a danger to society.
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