Skinned Tom

(Warning *Graphic details may bother some people)

Here's how the story goes:

Tom was young and attractive. He liked the ladies and the ladies liked him, too. He dated a lot, and once he'd dated the best picks from his own hometown, he 'went looking' in the next best place - the next town. He didn't have to look long, and began dating a sweetheart, though she had a secret she should have told Tom.

She was already married.

To and fro, back and forth from town to town he went almost daily, carrying on a heated romance with his newest sweetheart. It wasn't long, however, until the woman's husband chanced upon some small town gossip and learned what everyone else seemed to know well ahead of him - that his wife was being bedded by a young attractive Tom from out of town.

The husband wasted no time in enacting a plan to catch up with Tom. At the soonest opportunity, he told his wife that his job would place him out of town for the weekend. Nothing seemed amiss and his wife accepted his notification without question. The husband departed from the house on Friday, parked his vehicle elsewhere and doubled back on foot to hide in the woods behind the house for a while until evening.

Sure enough, early in the evening, Tom showed up, picked up his sweetheart to take her out to a Lovers Lane and do what lovers do. Just as things were warmed up, with Tom and sweetheart hot and heavy for each other in Tom's car, the car door was wrenched violently open!

Tom found himself face to face with a huge, terribly angry, knife-weilding fellow!

"Ohno - It's my husband!" Tom's sweetheart cried.

"That's right, you cheating *%$*!!!" her husband yelled, "And I'll teach you a lesson you'll never forget, too!" He pulled her off Tom, clear of the car, and rammed the blade of his hunting knife into her stomach, then flung her aside.

Sneering like a madman, the husband turned back to Tom, who blurted "No - don't hurt me - I swear I didn't know she was married!"

This revelation didn't pull any effect whatsover on the madman husband, and he dragged Tom from the car and skinned him alive with the hunting knife.

Immediately afterward, the husband left Tom for dead, drove himself to the authorities and turned himself in.

Only by a miracle, once the police arrived at the crime scene, they found that the wife was seriously wounded but still alive. Police searched the area diligently but Tom was nowhere to be found near or at the crime scene.

Tom was never found, period.

Some say Tom lives in the woods around Lovers Lane, hiding his disfigurements where his once handsome features stood out. He still carries the hunting knife - the very one used by the angry, revenge-exacting husband, which took the skin off of Tom. Some say he uses that knife to teach others the same lesson he learned on the day he was skinned.