The 10 Craziest Things People Have Done For Love

Meatloaf once poignantly said that he would "do anything for love, but [he] won't do that." We never did find out what the "that" was (Eat crackers in bed? Step on a Lego? Commit murder?), but we get the point. For Mr. Loaf, there was an important line to be drawn, some unnameable boundary for which love wasn't even worth crossing.

The lovesick people we're about to discuss have conveniently disregarded Meatloaf's spot-on advice, or have just never seen his VH1 Pop Up Video segments. Either way, they have ignored all wisdom and common sense, instead choosing to take the bumpy, embarrassing, and often illegal road of doing anything for love, no boundaries style.

While there are plenty of references to unrequited love in pop culture, be it tragic video game love stories, tortured TV romances, or creepy tales of love gone wrong in movies, we’re not unfamiliar with the idea that love can act like a disease of the mind. But what’s truly fascinating about these lovestruck loonies is that their stories are true. Many of them were pushed to murder out of jealousy, and some even stuck by the sides of their sick lovers after enduring countless horrors. Yes, love may inspire some of the best works of art of all time, but it also makes people do undeniably crazy things.

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, consider this your ultimate guide for how NOT to woo your crush this year. And if it makes you just a little bit more paranoid about a stranger’s advances — Is that box of chocolates actually filled with enough poison to kill 500 men? Will my ex-girlfriend try to run me over with her car three times? — don’t blame us. These love stories are so twisted, even we couldn’t make them up.

Brenda Delgado’s crime was so heinous, she became the only woman on the FBI’s 10 Most-Wanted List (and the 9th woman ever) until she was caught in 2016.

The dental-hygienist-in-training hired two people to murder pediatric dentist Kendra Hatcher, who was dating her ex-boyfriend at the time: another dental hygienist to drive the getaway car, and a hitman to commit the murder.

In order to convince hitman to pull the trigger, Delgado allegedly told him she was connected to Mexican drug cartels and could get him a supply of drugs in return for offing her ex-boyfriend’s new flame. Jealous dentists and the promise of drugs turned out to be a deadly combination.

Many boyfriends offer teddy bears on Valentine’s Day as a sign of affection for their loved ones, but in this strange tale of jealousy, Marshay Farnard lit an innocent stuffed animal on fire to get back at his ex.

Back in 2015, Farnard broke up with his girlfriend one morning and then went through her text messages and assumed she was cheating. Incensed by the idea of her being unfaithful, he grabbed her child’s teddy bear, doused it in lighter fluid, lit it on fire, and threw it in the fireplace. He also threatened to burn the house down, but thankfully police stepped in before he could cause more damage.

When traditional marriage counseling doesn’t work, it must be the work of the devil. At least that’s what Jose Magana-Farias and his son, Victor Farias, must have been thinking when they kidnapped Magana-Farias’ ex-wife from the parking lot of Walmart and performed an exorcism on her in the hopes of saving the marriage.

The father-son duo went all-out for the exorcism, even picking up two priests in the kidnapping car and dowsing the victim in sacred oil to purify her. Thankfully, she wasn’t harmed, but needless to say the marriage was not saved.

It’s a known fact that die-hard Star Trek fans are a little out there, but this story really pushes the limits of Trekkie outlandishness.

Carlo Morris Cerutti was accused of assault after swinging a “Klingon sword” at his neighbor over a dispute about trash. Apparently Cerutti’s wife, Joyce, got in a fight with the neighbor after he put his trash in her trash can. After she told him to stop, Joyce claimed, "I turned around and he chucked the bag at me and hit me in the back and then he started throwing garbage all over my yard."

So what’s a husband to do when his wife is being pelted with yogurt containers and banana peels? Break out his Klingon sword — a Bat’leth for the real nerds out there — of course! The neighbor was able to fight off the alien attack without injury, and Cerutti was charged with assault.

This crime truly takes the phrase falling in love to the next level. In 2010, a love triangle between members of a Belgian skydiving club turned deadly when one of the two women sleeping with Marcel Somers cut his other lover’s parachute ropes right before a routine dive. The victim, Els Van Doren, lept from a Cessna airplane 13,000 feet above ground to her death because of the damage to her parachute. Her twisted perpetrator, who had a history of mental illness, was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

This crime of passion is straight out of a Victorian novel. In 1973, an Italian man named Tranquillo Allevi was gifted a bottle of aperitif with a typewritten note inviting him to represent a new sales campaign. Upon drinking what he thought was a celebratory alcohol, he immediately dropped dead.

It turns out the aperitif had been sent by one of Allevi’s jealous wife’s lovers (she had been cheating with three different men), a veterinarian who injected enough poison into the bottle to kill 500 men. The vet was eventually caught when the typewriter he used to write out the invitation was found by the police.

It’s unclear who was more twisted in this disturbing love triangle, which unfolded on the digital romance stage of the early 2000s—a chatroom. In 2007, Thomas Montgomery fell hard for a woman he met online known as “Talhotblonde,” who claimed to be 18 years old. Montgomery, then 47, told his new digital obsession that he was a teenage Iraq War vet. But when his wife found out, she revealed Montgomery for who he really was, writing to Talhotblonde that he was a middle-aged man.

The chatroom vixen cut off her ties to Montgomery and instead aimed her affections at his co-worker. Montgomery didn’t take the breakup lightly and murdered his former flame’s new interest in cold blood with a .30 caliber rifle.

If that wasn’t a dark enough ending to a seriously strange story, it was later revealed that Talhotblonde was actually a middle-aged woman posing as her teenage daughter online. The lesson? Stay away from any romance that blossoms in a chatroom.

When Clara Harris found out that her husband David was cheating on her with his receptionist, she did everything she could think of to win back his affections, including dying her hair and scheduling breast implant surgery. When that didn’t work, she hired a P.I. to tail him and his new lover to a hotel in Houston. To add insult to injury, it was the same hotel she and David had gotten married in.

When she found out where the lovers were staying, she drove her Mercedes Benz to the hotel, attacked David’s receptionist, and then drove her car into David to knock him to the ground before running over him three times. The act of passion earned her the name “Mercedes-Benz Murderess.”

When Pamela Smart’s husband admitted that he had cheated on her, she didn’t come clean about her own infidelities, which involved a 15-year old boy who was a student at the school where Smart worked as the media services director.

Instead, Smart convinced the boy she was sleeping with to murder her husband along with two of his young friends. Smart left the backdoor to her house open, and the boys snuck in and shot her husband. They were sentenced to 28 years in prison while Smart got life without parole.

Both men in this twisted love story were pawns for a disturbed gold-digger named Celeste Johnson. Johnson married the first man, Steven Beard, a millionaire from Texas who was more than double her age and went about spending his massive fortune and drugging him so she could sneak off with other men. One of these men was Tracey Tarlton, who was so smitten with Celeste that he eventually agreed to off Beard.

One night, Tarlton snuck into the millionaire's house after Celeste left the door open and shot the old man while he was sleeping in his bed. At first, Tarlton protected Celeste and didn’t say she was involved with the murder, but once he learned she had remarried, he gave her up to the cops. Seems like their love wasn’t an everlasting one.

Don't deny Grandma a kiss, or she might shoot up your crib. This past March, when Helen B. Staudinger, a 92-year old woman, developed a crush on her 53-year-old neighbor, Dwight Bettner, she did what we'd expect any well-meaning grandmother to do: she cooked for him.

In return for doing her best Betty Crocker impression, she was given a peck on the lips. But when Staudinger found out that Bettner had a girlfriend, she went to his house to confront him and refused to leave until he kissed her.

When he shot her down, though, she went back to her house and did what any slightly insane grandmother would do: she grabbed her 350 Semi-automatic pistol and started firing at his house. When taken into custody, Staudinger explained that Bettner was telling her lies and "not paying his way" when they dined out.

Hear that, gentlemen? Take it from Helen: cough it up or get shot up.

When someone breaks up with you, you have two choices: walk away with your head held high and dignity in tact, or beg and plead with them to take you back. Last year, Kelly Summers went the latter route. When boyfriend Keith Tallis gave her the boot, she didn't cry on his doorstep; rather, she took her tears to YouTube, where she posted a whopping 62 video diaries. She documented her emotional breakdown, complete with runny make-up and wild sobbing.

Apparently it was a good watch, because the video diary amassed over 11,000 subscribers. But here's the craziest part: Her boyfriend said that her "raw emotion" made him realize he still loved her. We've heard of weird fetishes, but having a thing for hysterical tears is pretty out there.

Not since Patrick Bateman have we seen a man get as riled up over a business card as New York State Senator Hiram Monserrate. In 2009, Monserrate found a man's business card in his girlfriend's purse and took his anger out on her face, repeatedly slashing her with a piece of broken glass. Post bloody brawl, the disturbed politician was put on trial, and, rather than assisting the prosecutors, his girlfirend, Karla Giraldo, actually defended him.

When shown a security video in court that clearly showed Monserrate violently pulling her through their hotel lobby, Giraldo maintained that "he was not dragging me," even adding, "He was pulling me for my own good, and thanks to him I’m all right and my face is all right.” And what of her slashed-up face? She claims that she fell on a broken glass. Yeah, because that's entirely conceivable. Giraldo may be lying through her teeth, but one thing's for sure: This pair of nuts is a match made in heaven.

When Rodrigo Gomez broke the news that he was leaving Chile to take a job as a cruise ship waiter in Madrid earlier this year, his lovesick girlfriend, Grace Guajardo, wasn't having it. Instead of telling him she didn't want him to leave, Guajardo waited until her boyfriend was boarding his flight and pulled the kind of last-minute love-epiphany tactic you only see in cheesy romantic comedies: She called in a bomb threat mere moments before takeoff.

All of the 312 people aboard were forced to evacuate and bomb-sniffing dogs led by a horde of police officers were called to the scene. But when no bomb was found, the police tracked down Guajardo and arrested her. She might face jailtime, but she's not worried about that; Guajardo is just happy to have her man back. His take? "I can't be angry, I have to support her. What she needs is love, nothing more." Our take? Love and a whole lot of therapy.

Desperate times calls for desperate measures. So when Rasheen (Illuminati) Harrison's girlfriend broke up with him this past March, he decided to take the less-traveled road to winning her back. Harrison bypassed the typical route of flowers and shameless begging and decided to try something new.

His get-her-back move? Smearing his own excrement on the door of her Staten Island apartment, then setting himself on fire while screaming "I’m the devil!" Predictably, this move didn't land him the girl, but it did land him in court. Harrison offered some final words to reporters, shouting, "Yo, tell ‘em I poo" as he was escorted out of court.

Clearly, Harrison doesn't give a crap about maintaining his pride, nor his innocence. The operative word being "crap," of course.

We've heard of "taking out the competition," but former astronaunt Lisa Nowack took the phrase just a little too literally. When she discovered co-astronaut Bill Oefelein was dating another woman, she went after his new lady armed with a bag full of tricks, specifically a knife, a BB gun, a steel mallet, some rubber tubing, and a can of mace.

Nowack ambushed lady-rival Colleen Shipman at the Orlando International Airport, planning to kidnap and kill her. Luckily for Shipman, she only got the mace and managed to avoid the other instruments of torture by way of a swift escape. Lowack may have been an astronaut, but this crazy move proves she was no rocket scientist when it came to love.

When Burt Pugach met pretty-young-thing Linda Riss in the park, he immeditately fell into deep love. And, luckily for him, she felt the same way. But when she discovered he was married, she quickly kicked him to the curb, and found herself a new man.

Rather than moving on, Burt decided to the next best thing: become her stalker. And stalk he did, obsessively contacting and threatening her for over two years. But when he found out she was engaged to marry another man, he took it a step further—a very large step. He hired someone to someone to attack her. The hired help also took it a step further, knocking on Riss' door the day of her engagement party and splashing lye on her face, which left her blinded and disfigured.

Pugach was sentenced to 14 years in prison, but, get this: He never got over Riss. He continued to stalk her, sending her money and even proposing. And here's where the super-crazy comes into play. When he was released from prison, she actually accepted his proposal, and they married shortly after. Fuck if we know why.

We've all had our moments of over-reaction to social media slights, such as being annoyed when a good friend fails to leave the obligatory "Happy Birthday" wall comment, or the envy-filled moment when your ex's status returns to "In A Relationship" (and it's not with you).

Wayne Forrester's overreaction, however, was the stuff of horror movies. When he and his wife separated and she changed her Facebook marital status back to "Single," he got hopped up on cocaine and booze, drove to his wife's house, and murdered her with a meat cleaver. It's a sick and twisted tale, but what's most disturbing is his lame line of defense. He claims her interest in "meeting other men" and her Facebook status were the factors that motivated him to do this dirty deed.

Most women we know are turned off my disturbed, psycho killers, but not Caril Ann Fugate. When her boyfriend, Charles Starkweather, got into an argument with her mother and killed both of her parents, Fugate didn't run in the other direction, report him to authorities, or even break up with him.

Her next move: She helped him hide the bodies, and then ran off with him on a cross-country killing spree during which, together, they took out nearly a dozen victims. Forgiving him would have been one level of crazy in and of itself, but joining him in his insanity? There's nothing romantic about murder, unless, of course, you're totally crazy.