Not I, but someone I worked with. She picked that datum for one of those departmental offsite group-bonding exercises: “What’s one thing that nobody else in the group knows about you?” You write it on a slip of paper, and then everyone has to guess who it is. After you’ve done a few of those with the same people, you have to scrape the barrel.
So Judy’s factoid was that while she and her husband were on vacation at some major scenic-nature destination—it might have been the Grand Canyon—they called for room service at their resort, and their order was delivered by this somewhat scruffy-looking but pretty ordinary guy. Judy took the order and tipped him; her husband was in the shower at the time.
About two weeks later they saw the same guy’s picture in the paper, and Judy recognized him with a shock. He had been caught and arrested as the perpetrator of a series of gruesome murders of young women in the area.
So Judy’s autobiographical factoid was “I was alone in a room with a serial killer.”
And that’s as close as I have knowingly come to any such person. There’s no telling, of course, how many times I have ridden the bus, flown on an airplane, stood in an elevator, or walked down a dark street in close proximity to someone with blood on his hands.