In western society, we sure do love stories about serial killers. But mostly, we love our serial killers in one of two flavors -- dead, or in prison. That's why we make movies about them -- to see them get caught in the end (and hopefully shot by a rogue detective who doesn't play by the rules). But in real life , there are absolutely serial killers who do their thing for years, or even decades, without ever getting caught.

5 A Guy Poisoned Nearly 50 Vending Machine Customers, Got Away With It

Corpse Reviver / Wiki Commons

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In 1985, people all over Japan started falling victim to a wave of deadly poisonings. 35 people were hospitalized and 12 more were killed, all found to have been poisoned with the herbicide paraquat. Police were baffled about the source of the toxin, until they discovered the one thing every case had in common: The victim had recently drunk a beverage from a vending machine (not all the same one, though). This being Japan, the land of five vending machines per square foot, that hardly narrowed things down.

Michael/Wiki Commons

"This tastes funny; call an ambula- Wait, never mind, I accidentally got Mountain Dew."

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Upon further examination, it turned out the victims had all fallen for the same scam -- they found unopened drinks inside the machine's dispenser slot, presumably left there by the last person, for whatever reason. Since the human brain tends to shut down all further thought upon the discovery of free shit, they scarfed down the prized beverage ... then quickly regretted it. The poison was so effective that victims would often start to feel sick before they had finished their drink. We're guessing they still finished it, though, because hey, it was free.

To be fair, there was actually another, ingenious layer to the poisoner's strategy: The product most often tainted was a Japanese energy drink called Oronamin C, which was running a promotion whereby vending machines would occasionally dispense a bonus second drink. It wasn't hard to imagine that some customers were walking away without realizing that a second drink was rolling down the chute, a phenomenon that the killer was taking full advantage of -- the unsuspecting victims had even less reason to be wary.