9 Songs That Allegedly Drove People To Kill

8. U2 - "Exit"

When writing and composing the music for one of U2's most critically acclaimed albums, The Joshua Tree, Bono was inspired to pen a song about serial killers, citing the influence of Norman Mailer's novel The Executioner's Song and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. He said he considered it an interesting challenge to write "a story in the mind of a killer" and wanted a song "with a sense of violence in it." Unfortunately, someone else would be inspired by Bono's own creation, and not in an innocently creative way. In 1991, Robert John Bardo told a courtroom full of his peers that Bono's attempt at crafting a story of a killer had inspired him to become one himself when he murdered actress Rebecca Schaeffer. Bardo, who had become obsessed with Schaeffer a couple of years prior when he watched the actress in love scene from the movie Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, paid a private investigator to find her home address. Bardo routinely stalked her right up until he killed her in the doorway of her own apartment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sb65cIYG0s "Exit" was played during his trial, and Bardo mouthed the lyrics and drummed on his legs while it did, getting noticeably cheerier when the lyrics "pistol weighing heavy" came up.
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Jacob is a part-time contributor for WhatCulture, specializing in music, movies, and really, really dumb humor.