Welcome to the Thanksgiving True Crime mini-series I thought would be fun to do this month. Today, and for the next 2 Thursdays I will be posting the stories of some of the craziest Turkey Day crimes I have ever read about, and this first one is a doozy.
WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF A CRIME. IF YOU ARE REALLY SQUEAMISH YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP READING THIS POST.
Way back in the day in the year 1789, Our first POTUS George Washington officially declared that November 26 would be a day of Thanksgiving. Since then, Americans have been sitting down to a turkey feast with their friends and family on the fourth Thursday of November. Usually, these gatherings are full of love, and gratitude, and everyone enjoys each other’s company…
Then there are people like the one below who weren’t so loving and grateful for the others they were spending Thanksgiving with.
There comes a time in everyone’s life when our parents lovingly kick us out of the nest literally and financially so we can spread our wings and fly into full adulthood. Most young adults go willingly, excited about finally being an adult and the freedom that comes with it, but some kids need a little more nudging before they will leave. Heck, I was one of those kids, but I sure as hell didn’t even think about doing what this ass hat did, but at the same time I wasn’t mooching off my parents in the finance department, I had a full-time job and paid my bills.
Joel Guy Jr. is a different story. Growing up, his sisters described him as highly intelligent but reclusive, rarely leaving his room. He graduated from the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts in 2006. After that, he attended George Washington University for one semester before dropping out, then he went to Louisiana State University to study plastic surgery but withdrew in 2015. This behavior continued over 9 years, Joel attended various colleges but never graduated, and all of it was paid for by his parents, including an apartment in New Orleans even though at the age of 28 he had never had a job and didn’t even try to find one.
In 2016, Joel’s parents decided to finally completely cut him off financially because Joel Sr. (61) had lost his engineering job, and his mother (55) wanted to retire, sell the house and move back to their hometown in Kingsport, Tennessee. When Joel Jr. found out about their plans, he started plotting and planning the murders of his parents thinking he would get the money from their insurance policies.
Then on Thanksgiving day, the Guy family all gathered at their parent’s home for one last Thanksgiving feast before their upcoming move 2 weeks later. Everything was wonderful, Joel’s sisters even noticed that he was being more social than usual, but didn’t worry about the change because they saw it as a positive thing and they left to return home that night leaving only Joel there to spend the weekend with their parents.
What happened next nobody could’ve ever seen coming. On November 27th, Joel Jr. proceeded to murder his father while his mother was gone shopping. He found his father in his exercise room and ambushed him with a knife, stabbing him over and over. The knife pierced his father’s lungs, liver, and kidneys and broke several ribs. Then when his mother returned home she was similarly ambushed. An autopsy would reveal that Joel Jr. had severed nine of her ribs.
Then, he dismembered his parents, placed them in plastic tubs, and tried to dissolve the parts in acid. For reasons unknown, he placed his mother’s head in a stock pot and left it boiling on the stove before he packed up his car and headed back to Louisiana.
The following Monday when Joel’s mother didn’t show up for work, a welfare check was performed by police and the grizzly crime scene was discovered. The police also found the notebook that Joel had used to write out his plans and other details for the crime including the reason for murdering his parents, a $500,000 insurance policy.
On November 29th, Joel was arrested as he tried to escape from his apartment complex and was charged with two counts of premeditated first-degree murder, three counts of felony murder, and two counts of abuse of a corpse. In October of 2020, He was found guilty of all charges and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
