My father tried to poison me and my family for insurance money.
One day my mother came home to a strange man in the house. My father and the guy were having a hushed conversation, but before my mom could say or ask anything, the man quietly left. My father cooked up some story that it was just an AC repair man. His face was white. He looked scared. We suspect it was someone that my dad owed a lot of money to.
Soon afterward we started to get sick. Thought it was the flu, or some kind of stomach bug. I was allergic to a lot of medicines and sick when I was a kid, so nothing really seemed out of the ordinary. My mother, my sister, and me would occasionally have to throw up in the bathroom. One day my mom coughed up a little blood in the sink.
It was winter, freezing outside, and my father started doing weird things. Like insisting that we all sit on the front porch and smile while he took our picture. For no reason. He was a well-respected member of the community. He wanted to show everyone a normal and happy family life. In case he had to answer questions.
One night after dinner he told my mom he got an eclair for her from the grocery store. He insisted she eat it before bed, you know, so it wouldn't get stale. He had never done that before. A lot of things started adding up, she was getting suspicious, but she never thought, never in a million years, that my dad would ever do anything like what she suspected he was doing.
We were still sick. It lasted for a couple of weeks, and it just got worse. She cut into the eclair with a fork and some kind of greenish gray substance oozed out. She threw it away.
A couple of days later my dad made my mother some hot tea, and insisted she drink it, on account of being sick and all. Right before bed, he left it on the kitchen counter for her.
When my mom looked into the cup, there was something dissolving at the bottom of it, a pill of some kind. That's when she finally knew. She fished out whatever it was, put it in a plastic baggy, grabbed me and my sister and whatever clothes she could carry in one hand, threw us in the car, and we left.
The next day she called up a doctor that she could trust and asked if he could run a test on the pill or whatever it was. He told her that was against some rule, or I don't know, this part of the story is fuzzy, but she ended up taking it to a veterinarian. Told a story about how our dog ate some of these and got sick.
The veterinarian told her it was coumatetralyl... rat poison. He has been slowly poisoning us for weeks. Not much longer and it might have been a triple homicide. My father was willing to take the risk, blame it on carbon monoxide poisoning or something, maybe even set fire to the house.
We had enough evidence to convict, but my mom decided against it, because of a lot of different reasons. Needless to say I haven't seen my father in many years.