12 Christmas Crimes That Will Chill You

Probably the most famous of all modern true crime cases taking place on Christmas is the murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey. 

The child beauty queen was found in the basement of her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado on Christmas day in 1996, just seven hours after she was reported missing. Next to her body was a ransom note. She had been bludgeoned, and a garrote was wound around her neck. Her cause of death was ruled to be “asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma.” 

While immediate suspicion fell on the young girl’s parents, the crime remains a cold case to this day, one filled with odd details, but no definite clues as to who took JonBenet Ramsey’s life… or why.

Just a few days before Christmas, in 1929, the Lawson family went into town to have a family portrait taken – a portrait that has taken on eerie significance in the years since. 

On Christmas day, 43-year-old Charles Lawson shot his wife and seven of their eight children, before turning the gun on himself. Only one member of the family, their 19-year-old son Arthur, survived, having been sent on an errand shortly before the killing began. 

When police found Charles Lawson’s body in the woods near the farm, his footprints surrounded the tree where he lay, suggesting that he had paced in circles before finally taking his own life. 

Though there have been posthumous rumors, including of incestuous relations within the family, no one really knows why Charles Lawson did what he did that Christmas afternoon.

On Christmas Eve in 1945, the Sodder family home in Fayetteville, West Virginia burned to the ground. George and Jennie Sodder and four of their nine children who were home that night escaped the blaze, but five others presumably perished in the fire. 

While accounts that followed are scattershot and sometimes contradictory, however, most agree that no bodies were ever found. So, what became of the five Sodder children? Their family remained convinced that they hadn’t been in the house when it burned down, and that they may still have been alive somewhere. 

The remaining Sodder family continued searching for clues into the 21st century. Even today, however, we still don’t know what happened that wintery night.

Ed and Minnie Maurin were 81 and 83 years old, respectively, when they were reported missing by their family on Christmas Eve in 1985. Their car was found with bloodstained seats and the keys in the ignition, and their bodies were nearby. Both had been shot in the head. 

The culprits wouldn’t be caught for almost three decades, however, when authorities would finally pin the crime on Rick Riffe and John Gregory, who had kidnapped the couple and forced them to withdraw more than $8,500 in cash from their bank accounts before executing them. 

John Gregory died before he could be arrested, but Rick Riffe was eventually charged with “horrific crimes.”

Ronald Gene Simmons sported a beard that would have made Santa Claus proud… and a death toll that would have made Jack the Ripper blush. In December of 1987, Simmons began a killing spree that would become the deadliest in Arkansas history. 

Beginning on December 22, Simmons killed his wife and those members of his immediate family who were then living at his home, including his 3-year-old granddaughter. He dumped the bodies in a pit behind the house. The day after Christmas, several other family members were coming to visit. Simmons waited for them to arrive before slaying them as well. 

Then, on December 28, the first Monday after Christmas, he drove into town, and continued his killing spree. In all, he claimed 16 lives, 14 of them his own family members. Among his victims was a daughter he had sexually assaulted, and the child who was the result of that union. 

Simmons was sentenced to death, waived all appeals, and was killed by lethal injection in 1990.

Between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day in 1992, a group of friends who called themselves the “Downtown Posse” went on a killing spree in Dayton, Ohio that left six people dead and two others injured. 

The youths— the oldest was twenty, the youngest sixteen—tied up a man and shot him with his own gun, then went on to rob a grocery store, and commit several more murders, some of them their own friends, as the leader of the pack became increasingly paranoid about “snitches.” 

Ultimately, all four were arrested for their crimes, and Marvallous Matthew Keene, the alleged ringleader, became the 1,000th condemned person in the United States to die by lethal injection in 2009.

Paul Logan was a father of two who was working as a Chinese food delivery driver on Christmas Eve in 1993. That night, he went to deliver a meal to a farmhouse in England’s County Durham when he was told that no such food order had been placed. 

A little later, the homeowners became suspicious when they saw that Logan’s car was still parked at the end of the lane. They called the police, who found Logan’s body not far away. He had apparently been lured to the spot by a fake order, then bludgeoned to death. 

But who set Paul Logan up to die, and what was the motive? That’s still a mystery, more than thirty years later.

On December 18, 1996, authorities found a woman’s body in the children’s section of a cemetery in Annandale, Virginia. 

The unidentified woman became known as the “Christmas Tree Lady,” because a small, 8-inch Christmas tree was found near her body, along with a tape player and headphones, some money, and instructions for what to do with her remains, which were signed “Jane Doe.” 

Though authorities determined that she had taken her own life by suffocation, they had no idea who she really was—a mystery that would remain unsolved for twenty-five years, until the “Christmas Tree Lady” was finally identified as Joyce Marilyn Meyer Sommers, who had become estranged from her family decades before over allegations that she was abused as a child.

The killer dressed in a Santa suit is a horror cliché, but in real life, it has happened more than once. On Christmas Eve, 2008, Bruce Pardo arrived at the home of his ex-wife’s family in Covina, California, dressed as Santa Claus. 

When his 8-year-old niece answered the door, he opened fire. Along with several guns, Pardo had brought along a giftwrapped rolling air compressor rigged to spray fuel, which he used to set the house on fire. 

Authorities later discovered that Pardo had a detailed escape plan, but things did not go according to plan. The fuel caught fire too soon, leaving Pardo with third-degree burns. 

He eventually took his own life at his brother’s house, but not before his attack and the fire he set claimed the lives of his ex-wife and eight of her family members.

“This is the worst homicide we’ve ever had,” said Sgt. Roger Eberling, a member of the police department for the small town of Grapevine, Texas, near Dallas. 

He was describing the aftermath of a massacre carried off by 56-year-old Aziz Yazdanpanah, who arrived at his estranged wife’s apartment dressed in a Santa suit, before killing everyone inside, including his own children. 

Before the bloodshed, however, the family apparently opened presents together, despite the fact that Yazdanpanah and his wife had been estranged. When the police arrived on the scene, they found all six people in the apartment dead, Yazdanpanah having turned the gun on himself.

26-year-old Za’Zell Preston was studying to become a domestic violence counselor when she fell victim to it herself. According to authorities, her 39-year-old husband William Wallace beat her to death on Christmas Eve, following an argument at a neighbor’s party. 

That was only the beginning of the horror for her young children, however. According to prosecutors, Wallace then propped his wife’s corpse on the couch, placed sunglasses on her face, and forced her children to open their Christmas presents with her sitting there, telling them that, “Mommy ruined Christmas, she got drunk and ruined Christmas.”

On Christmas night in a St. Louis saloon, a dispute over a hat made history when William Lyons snatched a Stetson hat off Lee Shelton during a drunken argument. According to a story in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Shelton “indignantly demanded its return. 

Lyons refused, and [Shelton] withdrew his revolver and shot Lyons in the abdomen. When his victim fell to the floor [Shelton] took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away.” 

Shelton was convicted of the crime and would eventually die in prison, but he lived on in infamy as the source of one of the world’s most famous murder ballads, the song known variously as “Stagger Lee,” “Stagolee,” “Stack O’ Lee,” and other names.

Featured image: Wikimedia Commons; Annie Spratt / Unsplash