I'm writing a story about a murderer who kills people who support local law and its corruption throughout the kingdom. Now at first I thought this would be pretty simple, I know a fair bit about corruption and tyranny studying Nazi Germany and the USSR. But I don't know as much as I should about the middle ages and I'd like some advice. I'm trying to find three equivalencies of what used to happen in the USSR where children would rat on their own parents, examples in Poland where police would shoot innocent people out of compassion for not wanting their comrades to have to bear all the burden, and the third being a similar case to the Marvin Heemeyer incident in the USA.
I thought maybe the children selling out their parents and sibling to a inquisitor so he could inherit the farm, or even just to gain favor with a local lord. A soldier working for the local guard killing suspects in their witchhunt when he knows they're most likely innocent, and the local government isolating a peasant individual and executing them to safe guard a local lord from having certain secrets come to light. I know I'm going to have things wrong here, and I'm sure there's more accurate ways of representing these stories. Any help is appreciated.
Edit: Also feel free to tell me that none of my examples makes sense or even just link or name material for me to read related to the topic, I'm not here to fight you guys, you're experts here and my knowledge on the middle ages and even modern history is pretty limited. I appreciate anyone who takes the time to answer!
Hi there - we're happy to approve your question related to your novel, and we are happy for people to answer. However, we should warn you that many flairs have become reluctant to answer questions for aspiring novelists, based on past experience: some aspiring novelists have a tendency to try to pump historians for trivia while ignoring the bigger points they were making, while others have a tendency to argue with historians when the historical reality does not line up with what's needed for a particular scene or characterization. Please respect the answers of people who have generously given you their time, even if it's not always what you want to hear.
Additionally, as amazing as our flair panel is, we should also point out that /r/AskHistorians is not a professional historical consultation service. If you're asking a question here because you need vital research for a future commercial product such as a historical novel, you may be better off engaging a historical consultant at a fair hourly rate to answer these questions for you. We don't know what the going rate for consultancy work would be in your locality, but it may be worth looking into that if you have in-depth or highly plot-reliant questions for this project. Some /r/AskHistorians flairs could be receptive to working as a consultant in this way. However, if you wish for a flair here to do this work for you, you will need to organize this with them yourselves.