The Kray twins were born in October 1933. Reggie and Ronnie might have looked cute then, but they became the biggest scariest goons in the London’s East End by the 1950’s and their crimes included armed robberies, arson, murder and the torture of anyone who got in their way. Arrested and convicted in 1969, they were sentenced to identical terms of life imprisonment. Ronnie died in 1995 and Reggie passed away in 2000.

Sometimes families manage to gang up on each other. Lyle and Erik Menendez were convicted of killing their parents Jose and Kitty Menendez in an effort to get to their inheritance a few decades early. They tried to make the crime look like a robbery, but the police were immediately suspicious of the pair who seemed more intent on spending their new wealth than mourning their dead parents. Both received life sentences.

Wanda Holloway of Channelview Texas didn’t actually kill for her daughter’s high school cheerleading career, but not for lack of trying. She attempted to hire a hit man to kill the mother of the girl who was her daughter’s rival. In 1991 the determined mom tried to talk her never-do-well brother-in-law into murdering the woman for money. Her thinking was the murder of her mother would throw off the other girl’s ability to compete making way for Holloway’s daughter. The brother in law went to the police and the Texas Cheerleading Murder Mom got 15 years in prison earning release in 1997.

You would think that if a pair of brothers raped their sister causing a pregnancy the mother would be angry at her sons. Not so in one Palestinian household where the mother first tried to convince her daughter to commit suicide then brutally killed the girl to get her sons off the hook and uphold the family ‘honor’. Rofayda Qauod was raped by her brothers Fahdi and Ali and then murdered by her mother Amira Abu Hanhan Quoud while the girl begged for her life.

The Hatfields and the McCoys were famous in America and the names went down in history for their longstanding feud. The Civil War might have been one trigger for the families fighting as even though they lived in the same county, they took different sides. When a McCoy named Asa Harman returned from the Union Army after suffering a broken leg he was murdered soon after and the McCoy’s blamed the Hatfields, who were known for having hated the young man. Not long after a dispute over a hog turned nasty and the real bloodshed began. The feud became an out of control free for all on New Years night 1888 when several of the Hatfield men surround a McCoy family cabin and fired on the sleeping family. The cabin was then set on fire by the enraged Hatfield family in order to bring Randal McCoy the leader of their rivals out into the open. He got away, but lost two of his children and returned to find his wife beaten and left for dead. Eventually several members of the Hatfield family were brought to justice for this crime and one Ellison Mounts was executed for his part in the murders. The families entered a truce in 1891 and in 2003 both Hatfields and McCoys signed a real peace treaty in a move to show that Americans could come together and resolve their difference no matter how insurmountable they might seem.

Written by Kacey Stapleton – Copyrighted © www.weirdworm.com