A brutal axe murder of a friend of ours in a town of 2700 people.
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/classics/betty_gore/1_index.html
We knew every single person in the town and for the two weeks it took to find the perp, everyone was pretty scared. This town was so tight knit in those days that the newspaper didn't bother writing about this case. We all knew what was going on long before the paper was printed each week. There was a movie about this one called "Murder in a Small Town". Brian Denehy was in it. I remember going in the house after the CSI had been there and seeing the parts of the floor they'd removed to determine if the murderer was left or right handed. This case had me pretty shaken up for a long time. A few years later when I got to the middle school, a book I had been assigned had once belonged to the victim. I got quite a chill when I saw her name written on the inside cover.