4 Truly Deranged Acts by Bitter Exes

4 The Parking Ticket Revenge

In December 2009, Jennifer Fitzgerald received word that she had a parking ticket for leaving her car at O’Hare airport. Fitzgerald had not in fact parked a car at O’Hare. But the previous year, her boyfriend Brandon had bought a car cheaply from her uncle and inked her down as the owner. Apparently, post-breakup, he’d abandoned the $600 clunker at the airport parking lot.

Jennifer now headed over to the airport to move the car, as the notice told her to. The airport didn’t let her. Brandon hadn’t simply parked the car in the usual passenger lot but in a special section for American Airlines, the company he worked for. Jennifer had no access to the lot, she couldn’t move the car, and so, the Chevy Monte Carlo accumulated more and more tickets. Normally, the airport is supposed to have a car impounded if left in one spot for a long enough time, but someone with employee access periodically moved the car from one spot to another. 

Months passed. Years passed. More notices of tickets arrived at Jennifer’s door, and the fines compounded. The total topped $105,000.

She disputed the matter in court, and after considerable wrangling, a court reduced the amount to $4,470. In the legal world, that’s known as a huge victory, (“they reduced the fine by 95 percent!”) but if the court agreed she wasn’t at fault here, maybe she shouldn’t have had to pay anything? As it was, the court shifted $1,600 of the burden to Brandon, then ordered Jennifer to pay $78 a month for the next three years. That could work out to be more spiritually draining than paying the whole thing off in one lump sum. 

3 A Guy Gave His Ex AIDS (No, Not That Way)

Dr. Dick Schmidt was having an affair with his nurse, which is often frowned upon in the medical world. He then treated this nurse medically as his patient, while she bore him a child, which is also generally frowned upon in the medical world. Once they broke up, he injected her with HIV-positive blood in an attempt to murder her, which is almost universally frowned upon in the medical world.

He obtained this blood from another patient of his. He managed to inject it into his employee/patient/ex-mistress Janice Trahan under the guise of giving her an injection of vitamin B12. When the first symptoms hit, Trahan sought medical care from Schmidt himself. He administered an HIV test, which came back positive, and he told her it was negative. 

Later, Trahan realized she did in fact have HIV (as well as hepatitis C, which Schmidt had obtained from another patient and also injected into her). She connected the dots, and while it should have been hard to prove Schmidt had been responsible for the infection, investigators were able to thanks to a brand-new field of science — viral RNA. You see, this story happened back in 1994. This meant both that forensics were slightly more primitive and an HIV diagnosis represented a bigger danger. The HIV in Trahan’s blood shared RNA with Schmidt’s AIDS patient. Dr. Schmidt was found guilty of attempted murder and was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

In 2015, he was up for early release, and Trahan was still alive to testify. Schmidt did not receive parole. As far as we’ve been able to determine, Trahan is still alive today. Schmidt, on the other hand, died this past March in prison. 

2 The Exploding Vibrator

Terry Allen Lester came up with the perfect crime. Having broken up with his ex, and with the landlord demanding that he vacate their Minnesota residence, he departed like he was supposed to, but he left something behind. It was a bag, containing a box labeled “Christmas Gifts.” Inside the box was a sex toy. Into the sex toy, he had inserted gunpowder and buckshot. When his ex used the vibrator, he planned to detonate it.

Exactly how he planned to detonate it was unclear. When police examined the improvised explosive, they failed to find any element that would set it off. They also had trouble pinning an attempted murder charge on the guy because they were unable to determine exactly which of his several exes he ultimately planned on using the vibrator. 

Still, gunpowder is a dangerous substance to go slinging around, and they charged him with owning an incendiary device and issuing terroristic threats. He pleaded it down to four years of prison, after which he went on to a career of dealing meth.

1 Here’s What $1 of Gas Buys You

When Julio González came to New York’s Happy Land club on March 25, 1990, he didn’t appear to have murder on his mind. He was just there to argue with his ex, coat check girl Lydia Feliciano. She should quit that job, he said, and maybe get back with him, an unemployed dude recently fired from a lamp factory. At 3 a.m., a bouncer chucked him out.

González walked to the nearest gas station. He filled a container with one dollar’s worth of gasoline. He returned to Happy Land, soaked the doorstop and set it alight. The fire department arrived and put the flames out fairly quickly, but that brief time was enough for the partiers to trample over each other and suffocate trying to escape. 

March 25th happened to be the anniversary of New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 people in 1911. The Happy Land fire didn’t kill quite as many as that, but it did result in a death toll of 87. And unlike Triangle Shirtwaist, Happy Land was a mass murder committed by a single person. Julio González was found guilty of all 87 counts of murder. We’re pretty sure that makes him the single most prolific mass murderer in American history, even worse than the 2017 Las Vegas shooter, who killed 60. 

González died in 2016, during year 25 of his prison sentence. Six people of the building’s 93 occupants survived the fire. Among them was Lydia Feliciano — presumably the only person he'd been trying to kill. 

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