A North Carolina YouTuber and record store owner has been telling all about the time he purchased the record collection... of a serial killer.
The fellow in question (the YouTuber, that is) is called Dylan and he works at Noble Records in the small town of Matthews, NC. He’s uploaded the vid to the store’s channel and talked about how he came by the collection of Scott Williams, who lived in the nearby town of Monroe. Williams was convicted for the murders of three women between 1997 and 2006, but is now safely behind bars, serving three consecutive terms of life at the Alexander Correctional Institution.
Dylan recalled how one day in 2021 he got a call out of the blue offering him Williams’ collection: “No hesitation (I said), ‘I would absolutely love to.’ Because first of all, I like to buy anybody’s record collection… But also, when you buy a record collection - the weirder the person, the better the records. That’s just usually the way it is.”
“I did feel a bit strange going to a serial killer’s house,” he added. “But hey it wasn’t as if he was going to be there.” In the end, he changed his mind and the person who made the phone call came to him with the records.
He had expected the collection to include stick to cliché and include plenty of metal, horror soundtracks and the like. Not so, it seems. Williams records included mainstream fare like Barbra Streisand, The Carpenters and Johnny Cash. The only strange thing was the fact he had no fewer than six copies of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
“It was just so normal!” Dylan exclaimed. “The only metal record was an Exciter record, I think it was Exciter’s self-titled. Not particularly weird and not even really that exciting when it comes to metal,” he added. “It was stuff that you see every single day. Nothing rare, nothing cool. Nothing exciting.”
Dylan does reveal that he kept one record from the collection himself: “I had to keep one just because it was such a weird story,” he says, before showing what he considered the coolest out of the trove, by obscure 70s band Mama Lion. “Not particularly rare or valuable, but really really cool psychedelic blues rock type of thing.”
He also made the point that whilst back in the 1980s activists like the PMRC (Parents’ Music Resource Center) tried making the link between ‘satanic’ heavy metal and violent crime, Williams’ collection revealed a man who was seemingly ‘normal’. The lesson? Don’t judge someone by their record collection.
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