You ever search for an old childhood friend, and get a surprise?

[Big Racks]

My folks are getting on in years, Mom's mid-70's and Dad is in his 80's. Whenever I get out to BC to visit them we usually start going through old photos from my childhood, and I inevitably start trying to track down old family friends from when we were younger. It's more for my parent's benefit, they are still amazed by the whole FB thing and the ability to utilize Google to find people. Last year I managed to track down some family friends that we lost touch with years ago when we moved to Canada from the states. My mom and the other mom were really good friends and my brother and I, and the 3 daughters from the other family, grew up like cousins. Mom and their mom had a falling out and lost touch. I found 2 of the daughters on FB and made contact, they were ecstatic that I had found them, and we've all reconnected. Still hoping Mom can mend fences with her former best friend, but her friend had a couple strokes last year and isn't really recovered yet, hopefully in time.

Anyways, was just out there this last weekend and we came across another family we used to be neighbours with when I was a young sprout. At the time it was just my Mom along with me and my brother, and they were just the mom and the one son who was my age, so the ladies clicked and became friends and me and the kid played a lot together. We moved away from the area when I was 5, but we met up and visited several times a year still until I was about 10 or 11, when the lady and her son moved to Florida. Went through some photos of me and the other boy this weekend and mom was getting a bit nostalgic, so I thought it would be nice for her if I was able to put her in touch with her old friend, or at the very least find out what ever happened to her.

Facebook turned up nada on both the lady or her son. So, I turned to my Google-Fu, and started searching. Both of them had fairly unique names, so I was fairly confident if I could match a name to the area they moved to I'd be able to find something. Sure enough, I found the lady's obituary from January of 2016. The obit was very brief and made no mention of family. So I turned my attention to the son. To my surprise, I found him fairly easily. The first search result turned up was a newspaper headline "Cracker Barrel Slayings...". Holy crap. Turns out, the other boy, now 48 as am I, has been on death row in Florida since 1996 for a triple murder during a robbery of a restaurant he had previously worked at. To make it even more shocking, it wasn't a run of the mill shooting, etc... He drug the 3 victims into the walk in freezer, tied them up and cut their throats. WTF?? I know maybe we shouldn't be, as we haven't seen them since the early 80's and murderers are kids too at some point, but we were pretty floored. Evidently, the monsters really do walk among us.

Have you ever had any similar revelations?