WORLD'S MOST NOTORIOUS SERIAL KILLERS

JOHN WAYNE GACY

2011-02-08T09:02:00.000-08:00

John Gacy, Sr., was an alcoholic tyrant in his home, a crude exaggeration of the famous "Archie Bunker" character with every trace of humor wiped away. He took no pains to hide his disappointment with the son who bore his name, inflicting brutal beatings for the least offense, occasionally picking up the boy and hurling him across a room. In more pacific moments, he was satisfied to damn John, Jr., as a "sissy" who was "dumb and stupid," useless in the scheme of things. In time, the "sissy" portion of his groundless accusations would appear to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Chicago born in March 1942, Gacy grew up doubting his own masculinity, taking refuge from sports and other "manly" activities through precocious hypochondria. Struck on the head by a swing at age eleven, he suffered periodic blackouts for the next five years until their cause -- a blood clot on his brain -- was finally dissolved with medication. Deprived of one affliction, he developed -- or imagined -- another, settling on the symptoms of a heart ailment that seemed to come and go, depending on his mood.

After graduation from business college, Gacy became a shoe salesman, but he had his sights on better things. He married a coworker, whose parents owned a fried chicken restaurant in Waterloo, Iowa, and Gacy stepped into a ready-made role as the restaurant's manager. He was a whiz kid on the job, belying everything his father had to say about his intellect and drive, ascending to a post of admiration and respect among the local Jaycees. His wife and friends were absolutely unprepared for John's arrest, in May of 1968, on charges of coercing a young employee into homosexual acts spanning a period of months. Those accusations were still pending when Gacy hired a teenage thug to beat the prosecution's witness, and more charges were filed. Striking a bargain, Gacy pled guilty to sodomy, and the other felony counts were dismissed. Sentenced to ten years in prison, he proved himself a "model prisoner" and was released in eighteen months.

With the state's permission, Gacy moved back to Chicago, where he established himself as a successful building contractor. Divorced while in prison, he soon remarried, settling in a middle-class neighborhood where he was popular with his neighbors, the host of elaborate holiday theme parties. On the side, he was active in Democratic politics -- once posing for photos with the wife of President Jimmy Carter -- and as "Pogo the Clown," performing in full makeup at children's parties and charity benefits. Few of his new acquaintances knew anything about the Iowa arrest, and those who heard a rumor were assured that John had merely done some time for "dealing in a little porn ."

On February 12, 1971, Gacy was charged with disorderly conduct in Chicago, on the complaint of a boy he attempted to rape . The accuser, a known homosexual, failed to appear in court for Gacy's hearing, and the charges were dismissed. Parole officers in Iowa were never notified of the arrest or accusations, and Gacy was formally discharged from parole on October 18, 1971.

By his own estimate, the first murder occurred less than three months later, on January 3, 1972. The victim , picked up at a bus terminal, remains unidentified, but his death was typical of Gacy's future approach. In searching for prey, Gacy sometimes fell back on young friends and employees, more often trolling the streets of Chicago for hustlers and runaways. Like the Hillside Strangler, he would sometimes flash a badge and gun, "arresting" his intended victim. Others were invited to the Gacy home for drinks, a game of pool, and John would show them "tricks" with "magic handcuffs," later hauling out the dildo and garrote. When he was finished, John would do the "rope trick" -- strangulation -- and his victim would be buried in a crawlspace underneath the house. In later years, as he ran out of space downstairs, he started dumping bodies in a nearby river.

Planting corpses in the crawlspace had its drawbacks, notably a rank, pervasive odor that the killer blamed on "sewer problems." Gacy's second wife was also in the way, her presence limiting his playtime to occasions when she left the house or traveled out of town, but when their marriage fell apart, in 1976, Gacy was able to accelerate his program of annihilation. Between April 6 and June 13, 1976, at least five boys were slaughtered at Gacy's home, and there seemed to be no end in sight. On October 25 of that year, he killed two victims at once, dumping their bodies into a common grave. As time went on, his targets ranged in age from nine to twenty, covering the social spectrum from middle-class teens to jailbirds and prostitutes.

Not all of Gacy's victims died. In December 1977, Robert Donnelly was abducted at gunpoint, tortured and sodomized with a dildo in Gacy's house of horror, then released. Three months later, 27-year-old Jeffrey Rignall was having a drink at Gacy's home when he was chloroformed and fastened to "the rack," a homemade torture device similar to one used by Dean Corll in Houston. Gacy spent several hours raping and whipping Rignall, applying the chloroform with such frequency that Rignall's liver suffered permanent damage. Regaining consciousness beside a lake in Lincoln Park, Rignall called police at once, but it was mid-July before they got around to charging Gacy with a misdemeanor. The case was still dragging on five months later, when Gacy was picked up on charges of multiple murder.

On December 12, 1978, Robert Piest disappeared from his job at a Chicago pharmacy. Gacy's construction firm had lately remodeled the store, and Piest had been offered a job with the crew, informing coworkers of his intention to meet "a contractor" on the night of his disappearance. Police dropped by to question Gacy at his home, and they immediately recognized the odor emanating from his crawlspace. Before they finished digging, Gacy's lot would yield 28 bodies, with five more recovered from rivers nearby. Of the 33 victims, nine would remain forever unidentified.

In custody, Gacy tried to blame his murderous activities on "Jack," an alter-ego (and, coincidentally, the alias he used when posing as a cop). Psychiatrists dismissed the ruse, and the defendant was convicted on all counts at his 1980 murder trial. Life sentences were handed down on 21 counts of murder, covering deaths that occurred before June 21, 1977, when Illinois reinstated capital punishment . In the case of twelve victims murdered between July 1977 and December 1978, Gacy was sentenced to die. He was executed in South Carolina's electric chair on May 10th, 1994 -- the 26th anniversary of his first arrest for sexually assaulting an Iowa boy in 1968.

MICHAEL ROSS

2011-02-08T08:57:00.000-08:00

Born in Brooklyn, Connecticut, where his parents ran an egg farm, Ross concentrated on animal science in high school, moving on to Cornell University in 1977 and earning his bachelor's degree in 1981. After graduation, he worked briefly at an egg farm near Columbus, Ohio, but Ross had trouble keeping his mind on the chickens. Bicycling through LaSalle City, Illinois, on September 28, 1981, he kidnapped a 16-year-old girl and dragged her into the woods, gagging her with a handkerchief and belt before police arrived. Charged with unlawful restraint, Ross pled guilty the following day and paid a $500 fine, drawing two years probation before he returned to Connecticut.

On January 5, 1982, 17-year-old Tammy Williams disappeared in Brooklyn, while walking home from her boyfriend's house in broad daylight. Ross was not suspected in the case, but he had reason to be fearful, all the same. In February, he found employment at another Ohio egg farm, living peacefully for nearly three months before his next clash with the law.

On April 26, Ross turned up at a rural home in Licking County, asking to borrow a flashlight. His car had broken down, he said, and when Ross came to return the light, he also asked to use the telephone. Inside the house, he tried to choke his female benefactor - an off-duty policewoman - but she fought him off and gave a clear description to authorities, resulting in his swift arrest. Bailed out by his parents on May 11, Ross was sent home to Connecticut for 60 days of psychiatric study. On June 15, 1982, Debra Taylor was riding with her husband when they ran out of gas near Danielson, Connecticut. They split up to find a filling station, and Debra disappeared, her skeletal remains discovered by a jogger on October 30. In the meantime, Michael Ross pled guilty to assault charges in Ohio, on August 4, paying a $1,000 fine and serving four months in jail before his release, on December 22.

In May 1983, Ross was hired by a Connecticut insurance company, his application falsely denying any criminal convictions, and his work record was satisfactory until early November. On November 16, 19-year-old Robin Stravinsky was reported missing in Norwich, Connecticut, her body found by joggers a week later, near a local hospital. Ross's employer was pleased to note an improvement in Michael's work through December and January, but by March 1984, the young man seemed to be entering another unexplained slump.

On April 22 - Easter Sunday - 14-year-old neighbors Leslie Shelley and April Brunais disappeared from Griswold, Connecticut, en route to a friend's house. Two months later, on June 13, Wendy Baribeault vanished in Lisbon, on a short walk to the neighborhood store. Her body, raped and strangled, was found on June 15, and witnesses recalled seeing a blue sub-compact car near the scene.

Police began working their way through a computer listing of 2,000 sub-compact drivers, and they caught up with Ross on June 28. He swiftly confessed to the Baribeault murder, then directed authorities to a rural dump site, where the bodies of Leslie Shelley and April Brunais were recovered. On June 30, officers followed Ross's directions to the shallow grave of Tammy Williams, and by July 5 he was charged in a total of six homicides. Guilty pleas in the murders of Williams and Debra Taylor earned Ross a sentence of 120 years imprisonment. Convicted of four other slayings on June 26, 1987, he was sentenced to death ten days later. Recently, Ross' death penalty was overturned, and he later attempted suicide in his cell, but failed. A second suicide attempt was tried in 2003, but it also failed.

Michael was executed by the state of Connecticut on May 13, 2005.

HENRY LEE LUCAS

2011-01-12T12:50:00.000-08:00

It is a hard thing to say that one murderer is worse than the other. There is very little to differentiate a killing from another, in terms of the actual act. However, some stand out never the less. These individuals take murder to a whole new level. One may be persuaded to think of Albert Fish, or England's infamous Dennis Nielsen when such a thought is entertained. Preposterous and vile, these are the mutilators and dismemberers of the world. The persons whose unspeakable deeds are recognized as the most hideous of all time. The man I am about to speak of ranks among them. He is a monster from the Lone Star State, and his name is Henry Lee Lucas.

Lucas was brutally abused as a young child, horribly mistreated throughout his early years. He was into bestiality and the torture of animals during his early teens. He also engaged in sexual acts with his half brother at this same time. It is hard to comprehend such horrors as a child and adolescent, but Lucas dealt with them and much more. Little did anyone know that a sinister creature had manifested from this abuse, a year later all found out.

Lucas recanted that his first murder came at the tender age of fourteen. This was supposedly a seventeen-year-old girl he kidnapped from a bus stop. He claimed to have beaten her severely in the head, hauled her to an isolated area, and proceeded to attempt a rape. The girl came to and began to flail and scream. Lucas simply strangled her to death at that point. However, no incident of the sort has ever been reported. Lucas tended to lie quite often, so whether or not this story is truth is anyone's guess.

Lucas was arrested soon after this for breaking and entering. He spent a short time in a Beaumont training school for boys in Virginia. He was considered highly disruptive during his incarceration. He claims to have raped his twelve-year-old niece the day after his release. He was arrested again for breaking and entering, and was in and out of jail until his release in 1959. He moved to Tecumseh, Michigan to live with his half-sister.

Lucas killed for a second time that year, stabbing his mother in a blind rage following a family dispute. She died some fifty hours later of the wounds. He was tracked down and arrested in Toledo, Ohio. He was sentenced to 20-40 years in Southern Michigan State Prison for second-degree murder.

Sadly, over-crowding forced his release from prison in 1970. Lucas claims to have murdered two women soon after he was let loose, leaving one body close enough to the prison to see. As with his alleged first murder, no evidence was ever unearthed to support his claim. He was arrested again soon after for attempted kidnapping of a young girl and served four years before his release in 1975. This is where Henry Lee Lucas solidified himself as one of the worst of all time.

Lucas began a period of roaming, traveling everywhere from Wilmington, Delaware to Hurst, Texas. He married during this time, but was accused of molesting the woman's children and opted to leave. He seemed to move back and forth, often moving back in with Opal, until his other sister, Almeda, offered him work at her husband's wrecking yard. However, he was quickly accused of molesting her granddaughter. The next day, he deceptively asked to borrow their truck to pick up some junkers for the yard. They never saw him again. The truck left the family's driveway in Port Deposit, Maryland, and turned up in Jacksonville, Florida.

It was here that Lucas met a man named Ottis Toole. Lucas was soon living with the man and his family, sleeping with Toole and his daughter. This continued until, while on a trip in Delaware, Toole became sick and was hospitalized. Lucas took the man's children and headed for Maryland. Unfortunately for him, he was arrested there and spent approximately two months in jail. Lucas returned to Jacksonville upon his parole. Ottis' health improved and he returned to Florida as well.

Lucas and Toole were a reckless and violent tandem, stealing anything and everything. Even robbing banks occasionally. Lucas later confessed to numerous crimes during this period. One involved him shooting a convenience store clerk and watching Toole molest the corpse. This is where repetitive murdering for Lucas and Toole began. Another story shared by Toole enhanced this point. Lucas and Toole were on a Texas Interstate when they noticed a young guy and girl walking down the road. Ottis simply pulled over, stepped out of the car, and shot the boy nine times, disposing of him in a culvert. Lucas was busy fighting the girl to get her in the car. Ottis jumped in the drivers' seat and took off, while Lucas steadily and repeatedly raped the girl. Ottis stopped the car, dragged the girl out, and commenced to shoot her six times, and left her on the interstate.

The two murdered constantly, killing for a car, killing for sex, killing for fun. Anyone who drifted in their path was in danger. One girl was found completely nude in a field, the victim of stab wounds. Lucas were credited for some twenty murders in California, Michigan, Texas, and Maryland. Of course, Lucas confessed to some 600, "free lunches" as he called them.

Crazy as this may seem, it gets stranger. Lucas and Toole are approached by a man who offers them a job, contract killing. As if this does not delight the two enough, he declares they must join a satanic cult in order to be eligible for the job. They met with the cult in Miami soon after. The stranger introduced himself by name at this meeting, calling himself Don Meteric. He admitted to knowing Ottis well, which hurt Lucas, who felt betrayed. This did not stop him from pledging to the fraternity, however. He and Ottis supposedly were required to murder a man to be accepted into the cult. They were taken to the Everglades where Lucas claimed Ottis lured a man to a beach where Lucas lay in waiting with a blade. Lucas ripped his throat. He, Ottis, and the cult later cooked and ate the man in a "Black Mass" ritual. After their induction, they began kidnapping babies for sale as slaves. They kidnapped and drugged children and teenagers to star in illegal pornographic movies the cult distributed. Of course, as with a lot of Lucas' testimony, not a trace of this satanic cult was ever uncovered, leading one to believe it a hoax.

Lucas was supposedly told by the head of this cult to take some time off. Ottis stayed on after his departure. He went Jacksonville and met up with Ottis' daughter, Becky. They moved to California. They were playing the role of man and wife, but Becky, according to Lucas, wanted more than play. She apparently wanted the sexual part of a married relationship, but Lucas claimed "fatherly devotion", prevented him from that. Becky became inflamed at him, referring to him as a homosexual. Lucas resented this ludicrous accusation, and to compensate for it, raped and murdered a woman later that night while Becky slept.

Lucas then claims Meteric contacted him and offered him a job. The mark was a lawyer in Beaumont, Texas. He befriended the man and asked if he would like to go for a drink. When the man tilted his head back to take a few swallows, Lucas stated he slit the man's throat so deep that, "the liquor just spilled out the bottom of his head". He buried the body, only to dig it back up later and decapitate it, and bury the body with the limbs out of the ground so it would be discovered. They then drifted northwest, as far as Oregon and Washington, Lucas raping and killing as had become his routine. He tried to take credit for the Green River Murders, but this was proved impossible.

Lucas and Becky continued to roam, working for people and barely getting by. Everything was fine until one of the couples began converting Becky to Christianity. Lucas was immediately threatened. Not long after this, Lucas stabbed her to death in a field, raped the corpse, and chopped her up. He stuffed her into three pillowcases and left her in the field. He returned to bury her two days later.

Kate Rich, one of the individuals to have sheltered the couple, became suspicious of Lucas when she began hearing of him being around, and Becky leaving abruptly. Rich met with Lucas and questioned him. He said that she had run off with a truck driver. She immediately appeared not to believe him. That was all he needed to inspire another murder. He pulled off on an abandoned road, stabbed her, carved an inverted cross into her chest, and then dragged her out of the car. He then proceded to have sex with the dead body. He disposed of the lifeless corpse in a ditch. Later, he returned to dice her up and pack her in garbage bags. He spent the late night burning her in a wood burning stove. He departed in the early hours that same morning. This murder was a turning point in the psychopaths sick career. Family of Mrs.Rich contacted local authorities when Kate failed to answer phone calls or the door upon visits. When she turned up missing, witnesses said Lucas was the last person to see her alive. His record was drawn. To the horror of the sheriff, he had previous rape and murder charges, but this was discovered too late, Lucas was long gone.

Lucas wandered awhile, theft remaining his only source of sustenance. He was bouncing all over the country. Oklahoma, Amarillo, Texas, stealing and selling to survive. Time was getting short for Lucas. He returned to a town in California, Hemet, with the hopes of attaining a job he once had working for a man named Jack Smart. Little known to Lucas, Smart had long since caught wind of Lucas' dissaperrance the day after Kate Rich had vanished. He devised a plan on the spot. Acting as though everything was perfectly normal, Jack graciously welcomed Lucas back into his home, and phoned.his family in the hours that followed. Soon after, Lucas was taken into custody, cuffed in Jack Smart's antique shop. Unbelievingly, Lucas had to be released because of lack of tangible evidence. Back on the streets again, Lucas made tracks.

Lucas wasted no time, traveling all over continuing to kill if he felt threatened. He stayed primarily in the central states. But he made time in Illinois to abduct another woman, slash her to death, and sleep with her body. He dumped her in a grove, like so much refuse, but he made sure to clean all valuables off her first. He drove to Texas and ditched his car, then quickly began trekking back north via the thumb. But it was not to be, Lucas was running out of options. He was broke, extremely desparate for cash. He resorted to calling another ex-employer, Ruben Moore. Moore also knew he was wanted by the police in conjunction with a possible murder. For the second time, Lucas was lured. He was offered $100.00 to return to Moore's ranch and go to work for him. He arrived, and was greeted cheerfully by Moore, who had the police there to get Lucas the next morning. Presently, the only charge they could keep him for was theft of a stolen vehicle in Maryland. Authorities there would not order an extradition for Lucas, so, again, he was released. Luckily, only a short time later, Lucas was apprehended once and for all. The human nightmare was finally at bay.

Henry Lee Lucas died in his cell in 2001.

PETER SUTCLIFFE

2011-01-12T12:48:00.000-08:00

A "harlot killer" who proved rather indiscriminate in choosing victims was Great Britain's Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. While residing in apparent harmony with his beloved wife -- herself a schizophrenic who spent time in institutions -- Sutcliffe waged a five-year war against the female population of England's northern counties. With his ball peen hammer, chisel, and assorted other implements of slaughter, Yorkshire's ripper claimed a minimum of thirteen victims killed and seven wounded. In addition to the documented bodycount, he is believed by some to be responsible for other unsolved murders on the European continent.

The roots of Sutcliffe's homicidal rage are difficult to trace. His family appears to have been torn by dark suspicions, on his father's part, of infidelity by Peter's mother, and the boy's opinion of all women may have suffered in an atmosphere of brooding doubt. As a young man, he found employment with a local mortuary, and was prone to "borrow" jewelry from the corpses; in his comments, easily dismissed as "jokes" by his co-workers at the time, there is a hint of budding necrophilia, more disturbing then the strain of larceny. A favorite outing for the would-be ripper was a local wax museum, where he lingered by the hour over torsos that depicted the results of gross venereal disease. Before his marriage, Sutcliffe frequently expressed his fears of having caught "a dose" from contact with the prostitutes of Leeds and Birmingham.

Sutcliffe's first attacks on women, in July and August 1975, were unsuccessful in that both his victims managed to survive the crushing blows of hammers to their skulls, the slashes he inflicted on their torsos after they were down. October was a better month for Peter; on the 29th he slaughtered prostitute Wilma McCann, in Leeds, and thus officially began the Ripper's reign of terror.

There seemed to be no schedule for the crimes. On January 20, 1976, housewife/hooker Emily Jackson was bludgeoned in Leeds, her prostrate body bearing fifty stab wounds. Sutcliffe did not strike again for thirteen months, attacking Irene Richardson, another prostitute, again in Leeds. He moved to Bradford for the April butchery of Tina Atkinson, another prostitute, found murdered in her own apartment, mutilated after death.

On June 16, the Ripper struck again, but his selection of a victim made the slaying different, more appalling to the populace at large. At sixteen years of age, Jane MacDonald was an "innocent," the perfect girl next door, cut down while strolling to a relative's, almost within sight of home. Her murder put the Ripper on a different plane, immediately serving notice that no girl or woman in the northern counties was considered safe.

Maureen Long was assaulted on the streets of Bradford, in July, but she survived the blows that Sutcliffe rained upon her skull. In October, he crossed the Pennines to murder Jean Jordan in Manchester, crushing her skull with eleven hammer strokes, stabbing her twenty-four times after death. When she had not been found within a week, he would return to move the body and slash it further, making its location more apparent to police.

In January 1978, Sutcliffe killed a prostitute named Helen Rytka in the town of Huddersfield. In April 1979, another "innocent," nineteen-year-old Josephine Whittaker, was butchered in Halifax. A civil servant, Marguerite Walls, was murdered at Pudsey in August, and twelve days later Sutcliffe slaughtered co-ed Barbara Leach, in Bradford.

In the middle of their manhunt, homicide investigators were bedeviled by a mocking tape and several letters from "the Ripper." Later, with their man in custody, they learned that all were hoaxes, perpetrated by another twisted mind that found vicarious release in toying with detectives. Countless hours were wasted by police and independent searchers, looking for a man whose penmanship and accent bore no smallest similarity to Sutcliffe's own. The charlatan responsible -- suspected in two unrelated homicides -- remains at large today.

The Ripper had two more near-misses in October and November, wounding victims in the towns of Leeds and Huddersfield, respectively. Both would survive their wounds, and Sutcliffe took a year's vacation prior to killing co-ed Jacqueline Hill, at Leeds, in November 1980. The latest victim's mutilations were familiar to police, but Sutcliffe also stabbed her in the eye, unsettled by the corpse's "reproachful stare."

On January 2, 1981, police arrested Sutcliffe, with a prostitute, in one of several areas that had been subject to surveillance through the manhunt. Even so, they almost let him slip the net by stepping out of sight behind some shrubbery to urinate, there dropping the incriminating weapons that he carried underneath his jacket. At the station, Sutcliffe finally broke down, confessing everything. Detectives noted that their suspect seemed relieved to have it all behind him. So he seemed, as well, to spectators in court when he received a term of life imprisonment for thirteen homicides and various assaults. (Author David Yallop, in Deliver Us from Evil, links the Ripper with four additional murders and seven non-fatal assaults, including crimes in France and Sweden.) From Sutcliffe's truck, detectives had retrieved a written statement that appeared to summarize the Ripper's twisted view of life:

In this truck is a man whose latent genius, if unleashed, would rock the nation, whose dynamic energy would overpower those around him. Better let him sleep?

DAVID BERKOWITZ

2010-12-22T14:27:00.000-08:00

New Yorkers are accustomed to reports of violent death in every form, from the mundane to the bizarre. They take it all in stride, accepting civic carnage as a price for living in the largest, richest city in America. But residents were unprepared for the commencement of an all-out reign of terror in July 1976. For thirteen months, New York would be a city under siege, its female citizens afraid to venture out by night while an apparent homicidal maniac was waiting, seeking prey.

The terror came with darkness, on July 29, 1976. Two young women, Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti, had parked their car on Buhre Avenue, remaining in the vehicle and passing time in conversation. If they saw the solitary male pedestrian at all, he didn't register. In any case, they never saw the pistol that he raised to pump five shots directly through the windshield. Donna Lauria was killed immediately; her companion got off "easy," with a bullet in the thigh.

The shooting was a tragic incident, but in itself was not unusual for New York City. There was scattered sympathy, but no alarm among the residents of New York's urban combat zone... until the next attack.

On October 23, Carl Denaro and Rosemary Keenan parked outside a bar in Flushing, Queens. Again, the gunman went unnoticed as he crouched to fire a single bullet through the car's rear window. Wounded, Carl Denaro would survive. A .44-caliber bullet was found on the floor of the car, and detectives would match it with slugs from the Lauria murder.

Just over one month later, on November 26, Donna DeMasi and Joanne Lomino were sitting together on the stoop of a house in the Floral Park section of Queens. A man approached them from the sidewalk, asking for directions, but before he could complete the question he had drawn a pistol, blasting at the startled women. Both were wounded, Donna paralyzed forever with a bullet in her spine.

Again the slugs were readily identified, and now detectives knew they had a random killer on their hands. The gunman seemed to favor girls with long, dark hair, and there was speculation that the shooting of Denaro in October may have been "an accident." The young man's hair was dark and shoulder-length; a gunman closing on him from behind might have mistaken Carl Denaro for a woman in the darkness.

Christmas season passed without another shooting, but the gunman had not given up his hunt. On January 30, 1977, John Diel and Christine Freund were parked and necking in the Ridgewood section of New York, when bullets hammered out their windshield. Freund was killed on impact, while her date was physically unscathed.

March 8th. Virginia Voskerichian, an Armenian exchange student, was walking toward her home in Forest Hills when a man approached and shot her in the face, killing her instantly. Detectives noted that she had been slain within 300 yards of the January murder scene.

On April 17, Alexander Esau and his date, Valentina Suriani, were parked in the Bronx, a few blocks from the site of the Lauria-Valenti shooting. Caught up in each other, they may not have seen the gunman coming; certainly they never heard the fusillade of shots that killed them both immediately, fired from pointblank range.

Detectives found a crudely-printed letter in the middle of the street, near Esau's car. Addressed to the captain in charge of New York's hottest manhunt, the note contained a chilling message.

I am deeply hurt by your calling me a weman-hater (sic). I am not. But I am a monster. I am the Son of Sam... I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game -- tasty meat. The woman (sic) of Queens are the prettyest (sic) of all...

The note describing "Sam" as a drunken brute who beat the members of his family and sent his son out hunting "tasty meat," compelling him to kill. There would be other letters from the gunman, some addressed to newsman Jimmy Breslin, hinting at more crimes to come and fueling the hysteria that had already gripped New York. The writer was apparently irrational, but no less dangerous for that, and homicide investigators had no clue to his identity.

On June 26, Salvatore Lupo and girlfriend Judy Placido were parked in Bayside, Queens, when four shots pierced the windshield of their car. Both were wounded; both survived.

On July 31, Robert Violante and Stacy Moskowitz went parking near the Brooklyn shore. The killer found them there and squeezed off four shots at their huddled silhouettes, striking both young people in the head. Stacy Moskowitz died instantly; her date survived, but damage from his wounds left Robert Violante blind for life.

It was the last attack, but homicide detectives didn't know that, yet. A woman walking near the final murder scene recalled two traffic officers writing a ticket for a car parked close beside a hydrant; moments later, she had seen a man approach the car, climb in, and pull away with squealing tires. A check of parking ticket records traced an old Ford Galaxy belonging to one David Berkowitz, of Pine Street, Yonkers. Staking out the address, officers discovered that the car was parked outside; a semi-automatic rifle lay in plain view on the seat, together with a note that had been written in the "Son of Sam's" distinctive, awkward style. When Berkowitz emerged from his apartment, he was instantly arrested and confessed his role in New York's reign of terror.

The story told by Berkowitz seemed tailor-made for an insanity defense in court. The "Sam" referred to in his letters was a neighbor, one Sam Carr, whose Labrador retriever was allegedly possessed by ancient demons, beaming out commands for Berkowitz to kill and kill again. On one occasion, he had tried to kill the dog, but it was useless; demons spoiled his aim, and when the dog recovered from its wounds, the nightly torment had redoubled its intensity. A number of psychiatrists describe the suspect as a paranoid schizophrenic, suffering from delusions and therefore incompetent to stand trial. The lone exception was Dr. David Abrahamson, who found that Berkowitz was sane and capable of understanding that his actions had been criminal. The court agreed with Abrahamson and ordered Berkowitz to trial. The gunman filed a plea of guilty at his court appearance and was sentenced to 365 years in prison.

Ironically, Berkowitz seemed grateful to Dr. Abrahamson for his sanity ruling, and later agreed to a series of interviews that Abrahamson has published in a book, Confessions of Son of Sam. The interviews revealed that Berkowitz had tried to kill two women during 1975, attacking them with knives, but he turned squeamish when they screamed and tried to fight him off. ("I didn't want to hurt them," he explained, confused. "I only wanted to kill them.") A virgin at the time of his arrest, Berkowitz was prone to fabricate elaborate lies about his bedroom prowess, all the while intent upon revenge against the women who habitually rejected him. When not engaged in stalking female victims, Berkowitz reportedly was an accomplished arsonist; a secret journal lists the details of 300 fires for which he was allegedly responsible around New York. In his conclusion, Dr. Abrahamson describes his subject as a homicidal exhibitionist with fantasies of "dying for a cause."

There is another side to David Berkowitz, however, and it surfaced shortly after his arrest, with allegations of his membership in a Satanic cult. In letters mailed from prison, Berkowitz described participation in a New York cult affiliated with the lethal "Four Pi Movement," based in California. He revealed persuasive inside knowledge of a California homicide, unsolved since 1974, and wrote that "There are other Sons out there -- God help the world."

According to the story told by Berkowitz in prison, two of neighbor Sam Carr's sons were also members of the killer cult that specialized in skinning dogs alive and gunning victims down on darkened streets. One suspect, John Wheat Carr, was said to be the same "John Wheaties" mentioned in a letter penned by Berkowitz, containing other clues that point to cult involvement in the random murders. Carr had been in Houston, Texas, on June 12, 1976 -- the day Berkowitz purchased his .44 revolver there -- and six months after Berkowitz was captured, Carr "committed suicide" in Minot, North Dakota, under circumstances that police now view as willful murder.

Another Carr -- John's brother Michael -- died in New York City on October 4, 1979, after crashing his car into a streetlamp at 75 miles per hour. An autopsy found Carr to be heavily intoxicated, in spite of his well-known religious aversion to alcohol. Following his death, the "Sam" case was officially reopened, with investigations continuing to this day.

Newsman Maury Terry, after six years on the case, believes there were at least five different gunners in the "Sam" attacks, including Berkowitz, John Carr, and several suspects -- one a woman -- who have yet to be indicted. Terry also notes that six of seven shootings fell in close proximity to recognized Satanic holidays, the March 8 Voskerichian attack emerging as a sole exception to the "pattern." In the journalist's opinion, Berkowitz was chosen as a scapegoat by the other members of his cult, who then set out to "decorate" his flat with weird graffiti, whipping up a bogus "arson ledger" -- which includes peculiar out-of-order entries -- to support a plea of innocent by reason of insanity.

On July 10, 1979, David Berkowitz was assaulted by persons unknown in the segregation block at Attica prison, his throat slashed from behind in a near-fatal attack that left him with 56 stitches. Less talkative since his brush with death, he remains in prison, and the case remains technically "open," awaiting development of new evidence that may bring other suspects to trial.

ANDREI CHIKATILO

2010-12-22T11:28:00.000-08:00

Russias premier serial killer of this century was born in the Ukraine on October 16, 1936, In childhood, Andrei Chikatilo and his sister were repeatedly told how an older brother, Stepan, was kidnapped and cannibalized during the great Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s. In fact, no record exists of Stepan Chikatilos birth or death, no proof at all that he existed, but Chikatilos mother told the story so convincingly, in near-hysterics, that her children were convinced of its veracity.

If the grisly death of a sibling was not bad enough, Andrei grew up nearsighted, half-blind from his youth, and suffered a sexual dysfunction beginning in adolescence which that rendered him periodically impotent. Though he would marry in the early 1960s and father two children, Chikatilo persisted in believing that he had been blinded and castrated from birth, a condition which later fueled morbid fantasies of violent revenge.

A university graduate and loyal member of the communist party from his days of military service, Chikatilo went on to teach at an all-male mining school in Rostov-on-Don. From the beginning of his tenure, he was heckled by the boys, who called him Goose in mockery of his long neck and slouching posture. Later, after he began molesting students in the dormitories, they would call him faggot to his face, sometimes assaulting Chikatilo when he entered the dorm to enforce lights-out. Despite his age and size, Chikatilo was so frightened of the boys in his charge that he began to carry a knife on the job.

Andrei Chikatilo was a late bloomer in terms of the norm for serial murder. Most repeat killers begin claiming victims by their early twenties, but Chikatilo was forty-two when he killed for the first time. His chosen victim, nine- year-old Lenochka Zakotnova, was lured to a vacant house in Shakhty, where Chikatilo failed in his attempt to rape her, afterwards stabbing the child three times and dropping her body into the Grushovka River. She was found beneath a nearby bridge on Christmas Eve.

Police were quick to focus on a suspect in the case. Paroled rape-slayer Alexander Kravchenko initially denied the crime, but finally confessed in February 1979, after his wife was persuaded to testify against him. Initially sentenced to death, Kravchenko later saw his sentence commuted to fifteen years in prison, but angry complaints from the Zakotnova family prompted a higher court to reinstate the death warrant in March 1982. Kravchenko was shot by a firing squad in July 1983, thus closing the case on Andrei Chikatilos first murder.

Three years would pass before Chikatilo killed again. In the meantime, his admission of molesting students cost Andrei his teaching job, but party membership paid off with his appointment as a traveling procurement officer for a factory in Shakhty. He was often on the road--or on the rails--and traveling facilitated his search for victims in the years ahead.

Still, Chikatilo needed time to graduate from rare, sporadic murders to the frantic killing pace that marked those later years. His second victim, 17-year-old Larisa Tkachenko, was cutting class in Rostov when Chikatilo approached her and persuaded her to join him in the nearby woods for sex. She made the grave mistake of laughing at his failure to perform, whereupon Chikatilo strangled the girl, gnawing on her throat, arms, and breasts, swallowing one of her nipples in his frenzy, jamming a stick into her vagina. There were no leads in that case when Chikatilo claimed his third victim, on June 12, 1982. Twelve-year-old Lyuba Biryuk was lured from the village of Zaplavskaya, stabbed at least forty-times in the woods, her wounds including mutilation of the eyes that would become a standard Chikatilo trademark. More than a year elapsed before her skeletal remains were found, in July 1983. In the mean-time, Chikatilo would claim three more victims by years end, including his first male victim, nine-year-old Oleg Podzhidaev. While Olegs corpse was never found, we know from Chikatilos subsequent confession that the child was emasculated, his genitals carried from the murder scene in what became another signature for Andrei Chikatilos crimes. The elusive Shelter Belt Killer, so called for the frequency with which his victims were discarded in the woods along railway lines, struck a new frenetic pace in 1984, with fifteen victims slaughtered between January and September. While the murder spree was in progress, on February 22, 1984, Chikatilo was charged with stealing a roll of linoleum from his workplace. Seven months later, with that case still pending, he was arrested for licentious behavior in public, after policemen watched him accosting women at the Rostov bus station. Chikatilo was sentenced to fifteen days on that charge, but remained in jail for the next three months, while detectives grilled him as a suspect in the Shelter Belt murders. Cleared of suspicion when his blood type (A) inexplicably failed to match that of semen found on the bodies, Chikatilo was finally convicted of the linoleum theft in December 1984. He was sentenced to a year in jail, but a sympathetic judge gave him credit for time served since his September arrest, and Chikatilo was freed on the spot. The bloody game continued, bodies piling up around Rostov and environs, other victims found as far away as Tashkent, when Chikatilo hit the road on business. At one point, a group of mentally retarded men confessed to the series of crimes, and detectives were still pondering their contradictory statements when Andrei Chikatilo was arrested once more, in Novocherassk, on November 20, 1990. This time, he confessed his grisly crimes in detail, listing a total of fifty-two victims, leading police to some of the murder sites where he reenacted the crimes with mannequins.

Chikatilo had experienced a change of heart by the time his murder trial opened in April 1992. He now denied a number of the slayings he had earlier confessed, but with his statements on the record it was hopeless to recant. Sentenced to death by the court, Chikatilo was executed at a Moscow prison on February 16, 1994.

ALBERT DESALVO

2010-12-22T11:26:00.000-08:00

Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, during 1931, DeSalvo was another product of a violent and abusive home. Frank DeSalvo beat his wife and children regularly, and was thrown in jail on two occasions prior to the divorce that split the family in 1944. Fleeing a record of teenage arrests for breaking and entering, Albert joined the army at age 17 and was stationed in Germany. He married a German girl and brought her back to the United States when he was transferred home.

Posted to Fort Dix, New Jersey, DeSalvo was charged with molesting a nine-year-old girl in January 1955, but the child's mother declined to press charges, and so he received an honorable discharge in 1956. At the same time, he experienced sexual problems with his wife, demanding intercourse five or six times a day, regarding her as "frigid" when she turned him down. Matters grew worse with the birth of their first child, in 1958, with the new shortage of cash driving DeSalvo back to a life of petty crime. Arrested twice for breaking and entering, he received suspended sentences each time. During this same period, Massachusetts women began falling prey to the "Measuring Man," a smooth-talking impostor who posed as a talent scout for a modeling agency, wandering door-to-door in an endless search for "new talent." Once inside an apartment, the man would produce a measuring tape and proceed to record the tenant's "vital statistics," often fondling her intimately in the process. Some complained to the police, but many others didn't, and detectives noted the absence of any violent assault, ranking the case near the bottom of their priority list.

On March 17, 1960, Cambridge police arrested DeSalvo on suspicion of burglary, and he swiftly confessed to his role as the "Measuring Man." Charged with assault and battery, lewd conduct, and attempted breaking and entering, he was convicted only on the latter charge, sentenced to two years in prison. Paroled after eleven months, he was driven by sexual frustration to adopt a more aggressive, violent role. As the "Green Man" -- so-called for his green work clothes -- DeSalvo launched a two-year campaign of sexual assaults that claimed victims in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Police would later estimate that he had raped at least 300 women, while DeSalvo placed the total closer to 2,000. He once claimed a half-dozen victims in one day, spread over four towns, with two of the rapes unreported prior to his confession.

While police throughout New England sought the "Green Man," Boston homicide detectives were stalking an elusive killer, blamed for the deaths of eleven women between June 1962 and July 1964. In every case, the victims had been raped -- sometimes with foreign objects -- and their bodies laid out nude, as if on display for a pornographic snapshot. Death was always due to strangulation, though the killer sometimes also used a knife. The ligature -- a stocking, pillow case, whatever -- was inevitably left around the victim's neck, tied with an exaggerated, ornamental bow.

Anna Slessers, 55, had been the first to die, strangled with the cord of her bathrobe on June 14, 1962. A nylon stocking was used to kill 68-year-old Nina Nichols on June 30, and Helen Blake, age 65, was found the same day, a stocking and bra knotted around her neck. On August 19, 75-year-old Ida Irga was manually strangled in her home, "decorated" with a knotted pillow case, and 67-year-old Jane Sullivan had been dead a week when she was found on August 20, strangled with her own stockings, slumped over the edge of the bathtub with her face submerged. The killer seemed to break his pattern on December 5, 1962, murdering a 20-year-old black, Sophie Clark. Another shift was seen with 23-year-old Patricia Bissette, strangled on her bed and covered with a blanket to her chin, in place of the usual graphic display. With 23-year-old Beverly Samans, killed on May 6, 1963, the slayer used a knife for the first time, stabbing his victim 22 times before looping the traditional nylon stocking around her neck. Evelyn Corbin, 58, seemed to restore the pattern on September 8, strangled and violated by an "unnatural" assault, but the killer went back to young victims on November 23, strangling 23-year-old Joann Graff, leaving teethmarks in her breast. The final victim, 19-year-old Mary Sullivan, was found on January 4, 1964, strangled with a scarf, the shaft of a broomstick protruding from her vagina. Ten months later, on November 3, DeSalvo was hauled in for questioning on rape charges, after one of the "Green Man's" victims gave police a description strongly resembling the "Measuring Man." DeSalvo's confession to a long series of rapes landed him in the Bridgewater State Hospital, committed for observation, and where he was befriended by George Nassar, a convicted murderer facing trial in his second robbery-slaying since 1948. Their private discussions were interspersed with visits from police, ultimately leading to DeSalvo's full confession in the "Boston strangler" crimes.

In his confession, Albert even tacked on two "new" victims, never previously linked by the authorities. One, 85-year-old Mary Mullen, was found dead at her home on June 28, 1962, her passing attributed to heart failure. DeSalvo claimed that Mullen had collapsed from shock when he invaded her apartment, whereupon he left her body on the couch without continuing the usual assault. Mary Brown, age 69, was stabbed and beaten in her home on March 9, 1963, again without a showing of the "strangler's knot."

It seemed like an open-and-shut case, but numerous problems remained. The strangler's sole surviving victim, assaulted in February 1963, couldn't pick Albert out of a lineup, and neither could witnesses who sighted a suspect near the Graff and Sullivan murder scenes. Several detectives had focused their aim on another "prime suspect," fingered by psychic Peter Hurkos, but their man had voluntarily committed himself to an asylum soon after the last murder. And if Albert DeSalvo was driven by a mother-fixation, as psychiatrists claimed, why had he chosen young women as five of his last seven victims? Some students of the case believe the answer may be found in Bridgewater, where killer George Nassar conferred with DeSalvo through long days and nights. It is possible, critics maintain, that Nassar might have been the strangler, briefing Albert on the details of his crimes in hope of sending authorities off on a wild goose chase. DeSalvo, already facing life imprisonment for countless rapes, admittedly struck a cash bargain with Nassar, whereby Nassar would pocket part of the outstanding reward for turning DeSalvo in, afterward passing on most of the cash to DeSalvo's wife. As a "clincher," the strangler's lone survivor favored Nassar as a suspect, rather than DeSalvo.

Be that as it may, DeSalvo never came to trial for homicide in Boston. Lawyer F. Lee Bailey managed to negotiate a deal in 1967, whereby Albert drew a term of life imprisonment for crimes committed as the "Green Man." Never charged in the Boston stranglings, he was stabbed to death by a fellow inmate at Walpole prison, in November 1973.

OTTIS TOOLE

2010-12-21T17:49:00.000-08:00

A native of Jacksonville, Florida, Toole was born on March 5, 1947. His alcoholic father soon took off for parts unknown, leaving Toole in the care of a Bible-quoting mother who had hoped for a daughter and dressed him accordingly, complete with skirts and frilly undergarments. Toole's confusion was exacerbated by his grandmother, an alleged Satanist, who branded Ottis as "the devil's child." Toole ran away from home repeatedly, but always drifted back again. He suffered from seizures, and derived satisfaction from torching vacant houses in his Jacksonville neighborhood. Questioned about his choice of targets, years later, Toole replied, " I just hated to see them standing there."

By his own admission, Toole committed his first murder at age 14. The victim, a traveling salesman, picked him up outside town and drove him into the woods for sex. Afterward, Toole "got nervous" and ran the man down with his own car.

Classified as retarded, with an IQ of 75, Toole dropped out of school in the eighth grade. His first arrest, for loitering, was logged in August 1964, and others followed, building up a rap sheet filled with counts of petty theft and lewd behavior. He married briefly, but his bride departed after three days time, repulsed by Toole's overt homosexuality.

By 1974, Toole was drifting, touring the western states in an old pickup truck. Acquaintances thought nothing of it, at the time, but later evidence suggests he may have claimed at least four victims in a six-month period. Police suspect him in the death of 24-year-old Patricia Webb, shot in Lincoln, Nebraska, on April 18. Ten weeks later, on July 1, 24-year-old Shelley Robertson disappeared from Golden, Colorado, her nude body recovered from Berthed Pass, near Vail, on August 21. Ted Bundy is frequently blamed for Robertson's death, but the last innocent person to see her alive -- a policeman -- watched as she accepted a ride from "a wild-haired man driving an old pickup truck." (In those days, dapper Ted Bundy habitually drove a Volkswagen "bug.")

On September 19, 1974, a lone gunman invaded a massage parlor in Colorado Springs. Employee Yon Lee was stabbed, her throat slashed, before the attacker moved on to rape, shoot, and stab co-worker Sun Ok Cousin. Both women were set on fire, but Lee survived to describe her assailant as clean-shaven, 6 foot 2 and 195 pounds, driving a white pickup truck. Police, for reasons yet unclear, arrested -- and ultimately convicted -- Park Estep, a mustachioed soldier who stood 5 foot 10, tipped the scales at a mere 150 pounds, and owned a red pickup. Meanwhile, on October 10, 31-year-old Ellen Holman was abducted from Pueblo, Colorado, shot three times in the head, and dumped near the Oklahoma border. Homicide investigators now believe Toole pulled the trigger in that crime.

Two years later, Toole met killer Henry Lucas at a Jacksonville soup kitchen, taking him home for a night of drinking, conversation, and sex. The men had much in common, sharing memories of murder, looking forward to a time when they might hunt together. By 1983, according to police, they would traverse the continent together several times, annihilating random victims at a dizzy pace.

On January 14, 1977, Toole startled relatives by marrying a woman 24 years his senior. The relationship was curious from day one, and Novella Toole soon found herself sharing Ottis with Henry Lucas and other strangers. "A few nights after we were married," she said, "he told me he would get nervous a lot, especially when he couldn't get a man. He'd get angry, he said, and then he couldn't get excited with a woman." They were separated by 1978, Lucas and Toole moving in with Toole's mother, sharing quarters with sister Drusilla Powell and her children, Frank and Frieda.

The homicidal soul-mates found work with a Jacksonville roofing company, Southeast Color Coat, but office manager Eileen Knight recalls that they disappeared frequently, sometimes for weeks at a stretch. "Ottis would come and go," she told Jacksonville newsmen. "We'd hire him whenever he came back, because he was a good worker." Another part-time employer, Betty Goodyear, said of Lucas and Toole, "They went out of town, always disappearing. All (Toole) cared about was that old car. I think they were using it for robbing people, because they always seemed to have a lot of money." Along the way, Toole allegedly introduced Lucas to a Satanic cult, the "Hand of Death," that kidnapped children, practiced human sacrifice, and cranked out snuff films on a secret ranch in Mexico.

Toole's mother died in May 1981, following surgery, and the loss hit him hard. Ottis haunted the cemetery, sometimes at night, stretching out on the ground by her grave and feeling the earth move beneath him. A short time later, his sister Drusilla died of a drug overdose -- considered a probable suicide -- and her children were packed off to juvenile homes. Alone for once, with Lucas serving time for auto theft in Maryland, Toole brooded, drinking heavily and popping pills. (It was around this time -- on July 27 -- that six-year-old Adam Walsh disappeared from a Hollywood, Florida, shopping mall, his severed head recovered from a Vero Beach canal, on August 10.)

Lucas returned in October, discharged from a Maryland jail, and together the men contrived Frieda Powell's escape from a Polk County juvenile home. By January 1982, authorities were looking for the girl in Jacksonville, and she fled westward with Lucas. They were gone two days before Toole learned of their departure, and he lapsed into "a world of his own," pacing the floor and muttering over Henry's "betrayal." He wandered to forget and killed along the way, reportedly claiming nine victims in six states between January 1982 and February 1983.

On May 23 and 31, 1983, two houses were burned in Toole's Jacksonville neighborhood. Teenage accomplices fingered Toole on June 6, and he freely confessed to setting an estimated 40 fires over the past two decades. Convicted of second-degree arson in August 5, 1983, he drew a term of 20 years in prison.

By that time, Lucas was singing in Texas, and Toole backed his partner up with more confessions. Toole's statements "cleared" 25 murders in eleven states, and he admitted participating with Lucas in another 108 homicides. A practicing cannibal, Toole also dropped hints about his interest in Satanism, but stopped short of naming alleged fellow cult members.

On October 21, Toole confessed to the murder of Adam Walsh, startling Assistant Police Chief Leroy Hessler with details that were "grisly beyond belief." As Hessler told the media, "there are certain details only he could know. He did it. I've got details that no one else would know. He's got me convinced." In spite of that endorsement, officers reversed their stance a few weeks later, issuing statements that Toole was "no longer a suspect" in the crime.

Another troubling case harked back to 1974, and the carnage in Colorado Springs. Toole confessed to the massage parlor attack in September 1984, again providing details of the crime, but embarrassed prosecutors swiftly mounted their counter-attack. After hours of hostile grilling, Toole threw in the towel. "Okay," he told authorities. "If you say I didn't kill her, maybe I didn't."

Convicted of three murders,Toole faced two death sentences in Florida, with a life term in West Virginia for helping Lucas murder a police officer in August 1976. Ironically, Toole's name is seldom mentioned in the controversy over Lucas's confessions and his later change of heart, in April 1985. No effort has been made to challenge Toole's involvement in a score of homicides from coast to coast, and it is just as well, considering his dialogue with Lucas, taped by Texas Rangers in November 1983.

TOOLE: Remember one time I said I wanted me some ribs? Did that make me a cannibal?
LUCAS: You wasn't a cannibal. It's the force of the devil, something forced on us that we can't change. There's no reason denying what we become. We know what we are.
TOOLE: Remember how I liked to pour some of the blood out of them?
LUCAS: Ottis, you and I have become something people look on as an animal. There's no way of changing what we done, but we can stop it and not allow other people to become what we have. And the only way to do that is by honesty.

Ottis Toole confessed to four more Florida murders in 1991 and received additional life sentences. Henry Lucas was charged in the same cases, but prosecutors elected not to try him in the interest of economy.

ARTHUR SHAWCROSS

2010-12-21T17:46:00.000-08:00

Arthur Shawcross recieved a second chance at life after being released back into the community for the murder of two small children. Moving from place to place he ended up in Rochester, New York.

He married Rose Walley while in Rochester. He also met Clara Neal, who became his mistress. Working nights as a food wholesaler, and living near the center of town, he didn't even have a car. During the day he would be seen riding a brown Schwinn bicycle, a womans model, riding to fishing spots along the Genesee River.

Not many people wanted Art for a neighbor. In 1972 while in Watertown, New York, an upstate town Shawcross had murdered little ten year old Jack Blake, and eight year old Karen Hill. He served 15 years of a 25 year sentence for these crimes. He was released on parole in April of 1987 for those murders. After moving from town to town, chased out by enraged citizens, he found his home in Rochester. People there found him to be friendly, and mild mannered. They didn't know of his dark past.

In March of 1988 the body of a 27 year old prostitute was found floating in Salmon Creek. In September another body was found. Over a year later in October of 1989, a third was found, and in early November, a fourth. Later that month a fifth. Police believed the murders were too similar to be the work of different people...a serial killer was loose in the community.

Arthur followed the news of the murders closely. He warned his wife and Clara to be careful. He also hung out at the local Dunkin' Donuts to talk with the cops about the case. In late November another body was found by a guy walking his dog. Four days later another body was found. By the end of the year three more bodys were added to the death list.

Around this time, the Rochester police invited FBI serial killer specialists in to help. They made a profile of the killer: White male, thirties, mobile, trusted by the women who fearlessly got into his car.

On January 3, 1990 state troopers in a helicopter spotted a body in the icy Salmon Creek waters. On a bridge overlooking the creek a man leaned out of his car urinating into a pop bottle. The choper alerted some patrol cars and they surrounded the area. Shawcross had just finished a salad when he saw the copter. He climbed back into Clara Neal's Chevy and left toward the nursing home where she worked. As soon as he pulled in, a police car pulled in behind him and he was taken in for questioning.

Shawcross didn't fit the profile to well, but when the checked his history their interests changed. They impounded the Chevy, and let Arthur go for lack of evidence. While inspecting the Chevy they found a pink earring that matched on of the earrings found on one of the victims. Shawcross was picked up the next morning. For hours he denied involvement in the crimes. Eventually he confessed to the murders in detail. He had strangled one of his victims for calling him "no better than a faggot"...and saying that he was the Genesee River Killer. He smashed one's face into the car door for saying he was "hopeless," and killed one for claiming to be a virgin.

By the time his October trial came he had refused to testify. His defence tried to get a insanity claim. Under hypnosis he spoke as an eleven year old Arttie, and even as a reincarnated medieval English cannibal. A few of the prostitutes he killed had had their vaginas cut out, which Arthur had ate a few of.

He was sentenced to 10 consecutive terms of 25 years at the Sullivan Correctional Facility. He was convicted of 10 murders, but later admitted to an eleventh. He is still being held at Sullivan with no possibility of parole.

AILEEN WUORNOS

2010-12-21T17:41:00.000-08:00

She has been heralded in tabloid headlines and on television talk shows as America's "first female serial killer." In fact, Aileen Wuornos was neither the first nor the worst, although she did display a curiously "masculine" tendency to prey on strangers of the opposite sex. Suspected of at least seven murders, sentenced to die in four of the six cases she confessed to police, Wuornos still maintains that some or all of her admitted killings were performed in self-defense, resisting violent assaults by men whom she solicited while working as a prostitute. Ironically, information uncovered by investigative journalists in November 1992 suggests that in one case, at least, her story may well be true.

America's future media monster was born Aileen Pittman in Rochester, Michigan, on February 29, 1956. Her teenage parents separated months before she was born, father Leo Pittman moving on to serve time in Kansas and Michigan mental hospitals as a deranged child-molester. Mother Diane recalls Aileen and her older brother Keith as "crying, unhappy babies," and their racket prompted her to leave them with her parents in early 1960. On March 18 of that year, maternal grandparents Lauri and Britta Wuornos legally adopted the children as their own.

Aileen's childhood showed little improvement from there. At age six, she suffered scarring facial burns while she and Keith were setting fires with lighter fluid. Aileen later told police that she had sex with Keith at an early age, but acquaintances doubt the story and Keith is unable to speak for himself, having died of throat cancer in 1976. At any rate, Aileen was clearly having sex with someone, for she turned up pregnant in her fourteenth year, delivering her son at a Detroit maternity home on March 23, 1971. Grandmother Britta died on July 7, and while her death was blamed on liver failure, Diane Pratt suspected her father of murder, claiming he threatened to kill Aileen and Keith if they were not removed from his home.

In fact, they became wards of the court, Aileen soon dropping out of school to work the streets full-time, earning her way as a teenage hooker, drifting across country as the spirit moved her. In May 1974, using the alias "Sandra Kretsch," she was jailed in Jefferson County, Colorado, for disorderly conduct, drunk driving, and firing a .22-caliber pistol from a moving vehicle. Additional charges of failure to appear were filed when she skipped town ahead of her trial. Back in Michigan on July 13, 1976, Aileen was arrested in Antrim County for simple assault and disturbing the peace, after she lobbed a cue ball at a bartender's head. Out-standing warrants from Troy, Michigan, were also served on charges of driving without a license and consuming alcohol in a motor vehicle. On August 4, Aileen settled her debt to society with a $105 fine.

The money came, at least indirectly, from her brother. Keith's death, on July 17, 1976, surprised her with a life insurance payment of $10,000, squandered within two months on luxuries including a new car, which Aileen promptly wrecked. In late September, broke again, she hitched a ride to Florida, anxious to sample a warmer climate, hoping to practice her trade in the sun. It was a change of scene, but Aileen's attitude was still the same, and she inevitably faced more trouble with the law.

On May 20, 1981, Wuornos was arrested in Edgewater, Florida, for armed robbery of a convenience store. Sentenced to prison on May 4, 1982, she was released thirteen months later, on June 30, 1983. Her next arrest, on May 1, 1984, was for trying to pass forged checks at a bank in Key West. On November 30, 1985, named as a suspect in the theft of a pistol and ammunition in Pasco County, Aileen borrowed the alias "Lori Grody" from an aunt in Michigan. Eleven days later, the Florida Highway Patrol cited "Grody" for driving without a valid license. On January 4, 1986, Aileen was arrested in Miami under her own name, charged with auto theft, resisting arrest, and obstruction by false information; police found a .38-caliber revolver and a box of ammunition in the stolen car. On June 2, 1986, Volusia County deputies detained "Lori Grody" for questioning after a male companion accused her of pulling a gun in his car and demanding $200; in spite of her denials, Aileen was carrying spare ammunition on her person, and a .22 pistol was found beneath the passenger seat she occupied. A week later, using the new alias of "Susan Blahovec," she was ticketed for speeding in Jefferson County, Florida. The citation includes a telling observation: "Attitude poor. Thinks she is above the law."

A few days after the Jefferson County incident, Aileen met lesbian Tyria Moore in a Daytona gay bar. They soon became lovers, and while the passion faded in a year or so, they remained close friends and traveling companions, more or less inseparable for the next four years. On July 4, 1987, police in Daytona Beach detained "Tina Moore" and "Susan Blahovec" for questioning, on suspicion of slugging a man with a beer bottle. "Blahovec" was alone on December 18, when highway patrolmen cited her for walking on the inter-state and possessing a suspended driver's license. Once again, the citation noted "Attitude POOR," and "Susan" proved it over the next two months, with threatening letters mailed to the circuit court clerk on January 11 and February 9, 1988.

A month later, Wuornos was trying a new approach and a new alias. On March 12, 1988, "Cammie Marsh Green" accused a Daytona Beach bus driver of assault, claiming he pushed her off the bus following an argument; Tyria Moore was listed as a witness to the incident. On July 23, a Daytona Beach landlord accused Moore and "Susan Blahovec" of vandalizing their apartment, ripping out carpets and painting the walls dark brown without his permission. In November 1988, "Susan Blahovec" launched a six-day campaign of threatening calls against a Zephyr Hills supermarket, following an altercation over lottery tickets.

By 1989, Aileen's demeanor was increasingly erratic and belligerent. Never one to take an insult lightly, she now went out of her way to provoke confrontations, seldom traveling without a loaded pistol in her purse. She worked the bars and truck stops, thumbing rides to snag a trick when all else failed, supplementing her prostitute's income with theft when she could. Increasingly, with Moore, she talked about the many troubles in her life, a yearning for revenge.

Richard Mallory, a 51-year-old electrician from Palm Harbor, was last seen alive by coworkers on November 30, 1989. His car was found abandoned at Ormond Beach, in Volusia County, the next day, his wallet and personal papers scattered nearby, along with several condoms and a half-empty bottle of vodka. On December 13, his fully-dressed corpse was found in the woods northwest of Daytona Beach, shot three times in the chest with a .22 pistol. Police searching for a motive in the murder learned that Mallory had been divorced five times, earning himself a reputation as a "heavy drinker" who was "very paranoid" and "very much into porno and the topless-bar scene." A former employee described him as "mental," but police came up empty in their search for a criminal record. They could find "nothing dirty" on the victim, finally concluding he was "just paranoid and pussy-crazy."

The investigation was stalled at that point on June 1, 1990, when a nude "John Doe" victim was found, shot six times with a .22 and dumped in the woods forty miles north of Tampa. By June 7, the corpse had been identified from dental records as 43-year-old David Spears, last seen leaving his Sarasota workplace on May 19. Spears had planned to visit his ex-wife in Orlando that afternoon, but he never made it. Ironically, his boss had spotted the dead man's missing pickup truck on May 25, parked along I-75 south of Gainesville, but there the trail went cold.

By the time Spears was identified, a third victim had already been found. Charles Carskaddon, age forty, was a part-time rodeo worker from Booneville, Missouri, missing since May 31. He had vanished somewhere along I-75, en route from Booneville to meet his fiancÃ©e in Tampa, his naked corpse found thirty miles south of the Spears murder site on June 6. Carskaddon had been shot nine times with a .22-caliber weapon, suggesting a pattern to officers who still resisted the notion of a serial killer at large. On June 7, Carskaddon's car was found in Marion County, a .45 automatic and various personal items listed as stolen from the vehicle.

Peter Siems, a 65-year-old merchant seaman turned missionary, was last seen on June 7, 1990, when he left his Jupiter, Florida, home to visit relatives in Arkansas. Siems never arrived, and a missing-person report was filed with police on June 22. No trace of the man had been found by July 4, when his car was wrecked and abandoned in Orange Springs, Florida. Witnesses described the vehicle's occupants as two women, one blond and one brunette, providing police sketch artists with a likeness of each. The blond was injured, bleeding, and a bloody palm print was lifted from the vehicle's trunk.

Eugene Burress, age fifty, left the Ocala sausage factory where he worked to make his normal delivery rounds on July 30, 1990. A missing-person report was filed when he had not returned by 2:00 A.M. the next day, and his delivery van was found two hours later. On August 4, his fully-dressed body was found by a family picnicking in the Ocala National Forest. Burress had been shot twice with a .22-caliber pistol, in the back and chest. Nearby, police found his credit cards, clipboard, business receipts, and an empty cash bag from a local bank.

Fifty-six-year-old Dick Humphreys was a retired Alabama police chief, lately employed by the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services to investigate child abuse claims in Ocala. His wife reported him missing when he failed to return home from work on the night of September 11, 1990, and Humphreys was found the next day in an undeveloped subdivision, shot seven times with a .22 pistol, his pants pockets turned inside-out. On September 19, his car was found abandoned, stripped of license plates, behind a defunct service station in Live Oak. Impounded on September 25, the car was not traced to Humphreys until October 13, the same day his discarded badge and other personal belongings were found in Lake County, seventy miles southeast of the murder scene.

Victim number seven was 60-year-old Walter Antonio, a truck driver from Merrit Island who doubles as a reserve police officer for Brevard County. Found in the woods northwest of Cross City on November 19, 1990, he had been shot three times in the back and once in the head. Antonio was nude except for socks, his clothes later found in a remote area of neighboring Taylor County. His car, meanwhile, was found back in Brevard County on November 24. Police determined that Antonio's killer had stolen a distinctive gold ring, along with his badge, nightstick, handcuffs, and flash-light.

By that time, journalists had noted the obvious pattern detectives were reluctant to accept, and media exposure forced authorities to go public with their suspect sketches on November 30, 1990. Over the next three weeks, police received four calls identifying the nameless women as Tyria Moore and "Lee Blahovec." Their movements were traced through motel receipts, detectives learning that "Blahovec" also liked to call herself "Lori Grody" and "Cammie Marsh Green." Fingerprint comparisons did the rest, naming "Blahovec/Grody/Green" as Aileen Wuornos, placing her at the scene where Peter Siems's car was wrecked in July, but it still remained for officers to track the women down.

Meanwhile, "Cammie Green" was busy pawning items stolen from her victims, pocketing some extra cash. On December 6, she pawned Richard Mallory's camera and radar detector in Daytona, moving on to Ormond Beach with a box of tools stolen from Richard Spears. (She also left a thumb print behind in Ormond Beach, identical to that of "Lori Grody.") The next day, in Volusia County, "Green" pawned Walter Antonio's ring, later identified by his fiancÃ©e and the jeweler who sized it.

With mug shots and a list of names in hand, it was a relatively simple matter to trace Aileen Wuornos, though her root-less life style delayed the arrest for another month. On January 9, 1991, she was seized at the Last Resort, a biker bar in Harbor Oaks, detained on outstanding warrants for "Lori Grody" while police finished building their murder case. A day later Tyria Moore was traced to her sister's home in Pennsylvania, where she agreed to help police. Back in Florida, detectives arranged a series of telephone conversations between Moore and Wuornos, Tyria begging Aileen to confess for Moore's sake, to spare her from prosecution as an accomplice. One conversation led police to a storage warehouse Aileen had rented, a search revealing tools stolen from David Spears, the nightstick taken from Walter Antonio, another camera and electric razor belonging to Richard Mallory.

On January 16, 1991, Wuornos summoned detectives and confessed six killings, all allegedly performed in self-defense. She denied killing Peter Siems, whose body was still missing, and likewise disclaimed any link to the murder of a "John Doe" victim shot to death with a .22-caliber weapon in Brooks County, Georgia, found in an advanced state of decay on May 5, 1990. (No charges were filed in that case.) "I shot 'em 'cause to me it was like a self-defending thing," she told police, "because I felt if I didn't shoot 'em and didn't kill 'em, first of all ... if they had survived, my ass would be gettin' in trouble for attempted murder, so I'm up shit's creek on that one anyway, and if I didn't kill 'em, you know, of course, I mean I had to kill 'em ... or it's like retaliation, too. It's like, 'You bastards, you were going to hurt me.'"

Within two weeks of her arrest, Aileen and her attorney had sold movie rights to her story. At the same time, three top investigators on her case retained their own lawyer to field offers from Hollywood, cringing with embarrassment when their unseemly haste to profit on the case was publicly revealed. In self-defense, the officers maintained that they were moved to sell their version of the case by "pure intentions," planning to put the money in "a victim's fund." To a man, they denounced exposure of their scheme as the malicious work of brother officers, driven by their jealousy at being cut out of the deal.

A bizarre sideshow to the pending murder trial began in late January 1991, with the appearance of Arlene Pralle as Aileen's chief advocate. A 44-year-old rancher's wife and "born-again" Christian, Pralle advised Wuornos in her first letter to prison that "Jesus told me to write you." Soon, they were having daily telephone conversations at Pralle's expense, Arlene arranging interviews for Wuornos and herself, becoming a fixture on tabloid talk shows from coast to coast. In Pralle's words, their relation-ship was "a soul binding. We're like Jonathan and David in the Bible. It's as though part of me is trapped in jail with her. We always know what the other is feeling and thinking. I just wish I was Houdini. I would get her out of there. If there was a way, I would do it, and we could go and be vagabonds forever." Instead, Pralle did the next best thing, legally adopting Wuornos as her "daughter."

Aileen's trial for the murder of Richard Mallory opened on January 13, 1992. Eleven days later, Wuornos took the stand as the only defense witness, repeating her tale of violent rape and beating at Mallory's hands, insisting that she shot him dead in self-defense, using her pistol only after he threatened her life. With no hard evidence to support her claim, jurors rejected the story, deliberating a mere ninety minutes before they convicted Aileen of first-degree murder on January 27. "I'm innocent," she shouted when the verdict was announced. "I was raped! I hope you get raped! Scumbags of America!" The jury recommended death on January 29, and the following day Aileen was formally sentenced to die. In April, she pled guilty to the murders of victims Burress, Humphreys, and Spears, with a second death sentence delivered on May 7, 1992.

Around the same time, Aileen offered to show police where the corpse of Peter Siems was hidden, near Beaufort, South Carolina. Authorities flew her to the Piedmont State, but nothing was found at the designated site, Daytona police insisting that Wuornos created the ruse to get a free vacation from jail. They speculate that Siems was dumped in a swamp near I-95, north of Jacksonville, but his body has never been found.

The Wuornos case took an ironic twist on November 10, 1992, with reporter Michele Gillen's revelations on "Dateline NBC." Thus far, Aileen's defenders and Florida prosecutors alike had failed to unearth any criminal record for Richard Mallory that would substantiate Aileen's claim of rape and assault. In the official view, Mallory was "clean," if somewhat "paranoid and pussy-crazy." Gillen, though had no apparent difficulty finding out that Mallory had served ten years for a violent rape in another state, facts easily obtained by checking his name through the FBI's computer network.

"The fascinating part about this," Gillen said, "is here is a woman who for the past year has been screaming that she didn't get a fair trial and that everyone was rushing to make a TV movie about her--and in reality that comes true." (The first TV movie depicting Aileen aired on a rival network one week to the day after Gillen's report.) Even so, Gillen stopped short of calling for Aileen's release. "She's a sick woman who blew those men away," Gillen declared, "but that's no reason for the state to say, 'She's confessed to killing men, we don't have to do our homework.'"

PEDRO LOPEZ

2010-12-21T16:12:00.001-08:00

Pedro Lopez was born in 1949 to a prostitute. He was one of 13 children. At the age of eight, he sexually molested one of his sister, and as a punishment for this his mother kicked him into the streets. He was molested at that age by another man in a neighboring town. He was assaulted again when he was eighteen while in prison for car theft. He was gang raped by four older convicts, and this led to his first murder conviction when he killed three of the four attackers. He recieved a two year sentence for that. His term only made him want to kill more. Usually, he'd wander through the market till he found a girl that he could take to a isolated spot. First he would rape, then second he would strangle the girl. In 1978 he is said to have killed a hundred girls from Peru. In a Indian village he was caught trying to take a nine-year-old girl. The Ayachucos' Indians that caught him considered justice to be a beating then torturing, then burying him alive. But before they could do this an American missionary talked them into letting her take him to the authorities. The authorities took Lopez to Ecuador instead of punishing him for the crime. He killed and raped possibly 110 Ecuador girls. In 1980, he was caught leading away a twelve-year-old girl. This came after the unearthing of fifty-three victims. He took them to many other burial sites, but no other bodies were found. They think that Lopez led them on a wild goose chase on the other searches. Lopez is still in prison in Ecuador, and may get a chance for parole. However, if released he still has trials and prison time coming to him in Colombia and Peru.

ED KEMPER

2010-12-21T16:07:00.000-08:00

The product of a broken and abusive home, belittled by a shrewish mother who occasionally locked him in the basement when he failed to meet her standards of behavior, Edmund Kemper grew up timid and resentful, nursing a perception of his own inadequacy that gave rise to morbid fantasies of death and mutilation . As a child, he often played a "game" in which his sisters took the part of executioners, with Kemper as their victim , writhing in imaginary death throes when they "threw the switch." Preoccupied with visions of decapitation and dismemberment, he cut the head and hands off of his sister's doll -- a modus operandi that he would repeat, as an adult, with human victims.

Before the age of ten, Kemper graduated to living targets, burying the family cat alive and subsequently cutting off its head, returning with the gruesome trophy to his room, where it was placed on proud display. Despite his tender age, he brooded over fantasies of love and sex, with violence playing an inevitable role. Unable to express affection in a normal way, he showed the warning signals of a latent necrophile . One afternoon, discussing Edmund's childish crush upon a grade-school teacher, Kemper's sister asked him why he did not simply kiss the woman. Kemper answered, dead-pan, "If I kiss her, I would have to kill her first." A second family cat fell victim to his urges, this one hacked with a machete, pieces of the carcass hidden in his closet until they were accidentally discovered by his mother .

Branding her son "a real weirdo," Kemper's mother first packed him off to live with her estranged husband, and then -- after running away -- the boy was delivered to his paternal grandparents, residing on a remote California ranch. There, in August 1963, fourteen-year-old Kemper shot his grandmother with a .22-caliber rifle, afterward stabbing her body repeatedly with a kitchen knife. When his grandfather came home, Kemper shot the old man as well, leaving him dead in the yard.

Interrogated by authorities, Kemper could only say that "I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma." He regretted not stripping her corpse, and this statement, along with the motiveless violence displayed in his actions, got Kemper committed to the state's maximum-security hospital at Atascadero. In 1969, a 21-year-old behemoth grown to six-foot-nine and some 300 pounds, Kemper was paroled to his mother's custody over the objections of the state psychiatrists.

During Kemper's enforced absence, his mother had settled in Santa Cruz, a college town whose population boasted thousands of attractive co-eds. For the next two years, through 1970 and '71, Kemper bided his time, holding odd jobs and cruising the highways in his leisure time, picking up dozens of young female hitchhikers, refining his approach, his "line," until, he knew that he could put them totally at ease. Some evenings, he would frequent a saloon patronized by off-duty policemen, rubbing shoulders with the law and soaking up their tales of crime, becoming friendly with a number of detectives who would later be assigned to track him down.

On May 7, 1972, Kemper picked up two 18-year-old roommates from Fresno State College, Mary Ann Pesce and Anita Luchessa. Driving them to a secluded cul-de-sac, he stabbed both girls to death, then took their bodies home and hid them in his room. Delighted with his "trophies," Kemper took Polaroid snapshots, dissected the corpses, and sexually assaulted various organs before finally tiring of the game. Bundling the remains into plastic bags, he buried the truncated bodies in the Santa Cruz mountains, tossing the heads into a roadside ravine.

Four months later, on September 14, Kemper offered a ride to 15-year-old Aiko Koo. Suffocating her with his large hands, Kemper raped her corpse on the spot and then carried it home for dissection. Koo's severed head was resting in the trunk of Kemper's car next morning, when he met with state psychiatrists and they pronounced him "safe," recommending that his juvenile record be sealed for Kemper's future protection. Following the interview, he buried Koo's remains near a religious camp located in the mountains.

Another four months passed before the "Co-ed Killer" struck again, on January 9, 1973. Picking up student Cindy Schall, Kemper forced her into the trunk of his car at gunpoint, then shot her to death. Driving back to his mother's house, he carried the corpse to his room, and there had sex with it in his bed. Afterward, Kemper dissected Schall's body in the bathtub, bagging the remains and tossing them over a cliff, into the sea. Schall's head was buried in the back yard of his mother's home.

By this time, various remains of Kemper's victims had been found and officers were on the case. Apparently, none of them had the least suspicion that their friend, Ed Kemper, was the man they sought, and some felt comfortable enough in Kemper's company to brief him on the progress of their homicide investigation. Smiling, often springing for the next round, Kemper was all ears.

On February 5, 1973, Kemper picked up Rosalind Thorpe, 23, and another hitchhiker, Alice Lin. Both young women were shot to death in the car, then stacked in the trunk like so much excess luggage. Driving home, Kemper ate dinner and waited for his mother to retire before stepping outside and decapitating both corpses as they lay in the trunk. Unsatisfied, he carried Lin's body inside and sexually assaulted it on the floor. Returning to the car, he chopped her hands off as a casual afterthought.

With spring's arrival, Kemper's frenzy escalated coming back full circle to his home and family. He toyed with the idea of killing everybody on his block, as "a demonstration to the authorities," but finally dismissed the notion. Instead, on Easter weekend. Kemper turned upon his mother, hammering her skull in as she slept. Decapitating her, he raped the headless corpse, then jammed her severed larynx down the garbage disposal. ("This seemed appropriate," he told police, "as much as she'd bitched and screamed and yelled at me over so many years.") Her head was propped on the mantle for use as a dart board.

Still not sated, Kemper telephoned a friend of his mother's, Sally Hallett, and invited her over for a "surprise" dinner in his mother's honor. Upon her arrival, Kemper clubbed her over the head, strangled her to death, and then decapitated her. The headless body was deposited in his bed, while he wandered off to sleep in his mother's room.

On Easter Sunday, Kemper started driving east, with no destination in mind. He got as far as Colorado before pulling over to a roadside telephone booth and calling police in Santa Cruz. Several attempts were necessary before his friends would accept his confession , and local officers were dispatched to make the arrest while Kemper waited patiently in his car.

In his detailed confessions, Kemper admitted slicing flesh from the legs of at least two victims, cooking it in a macaroni casserole and devouring it as a means of "possessing" his prey. He also acknowledged removing teeth, along with bits of hair and skin from his victims, retaining them as grisly keepsakes, trophies of the hunt. Described as sane by state psychiatrists, Kemper was convicted on eight counts of murder. Asked what punishment he considered fitting for his crimes, the defendant replied, "Death by torture." Instead, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, with the possibility of parole.

DAVID HARKER

2010-12-21T16:03:00.001-08:00

On February, 1999, cannibal killer David Harker admitted to manslaughter in the death of 32-year-old Julie Paterson, on grounds of diminished responsibility. Prosecutor Paul Worsley told Teesside Crown Court in northeast England that Harker confided to a psychiatrist that he chopped up his victim and ate part of her body with pasta and cheese. Harker, 24, who has the words "Subhuman" and "Disorder" tattooed on his scalp, claimed he strangled mother-of-four Julie Paterson with her tights after he "got bored" during a sex session. He told psychiatrists he then had sex with her before chopping off her head and limbs, slicing flesh from her thigh, skinning it and cooking it.

The 6'5" unemployed killer bragged about his cannibal feast and claimed to be a serial killer. After Julie's death he boasted that he had killed two other people, one a tramp-like man in the North East. Paul Worsley QC, prosecuting in Teesside Crown Court, said police had investigated his claims but could find no evidence to prove them.

For years Harker fantasised becoming a "notorious serial killer". Witnesses told detectives he "avidly viewed" films about serial killers and read books on them. He boasted to friends that he "wanted to kill someone" and had erotic fantasies about mutilating bodies. His favourite films were Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer and A Clockwork Orange. When doctors asked him about Hannibal Lecter in the film Silence Of The Lambs he said chillingly: "People like me don't come from films - them films come from people like me."

JOEL RIFKIN

2010-12-21T15:57:00.000-08:00

New Yorks worst serial murder case of this century began--or ended--with a routine traffic stop in the predawn hours of June 28, 1993. State troopers Deborah Spaargaren and Sean Ruane were working the graveyard shift in East Meadow, Long Island, when they spotted a pickup truck with no license plate ahead of them, at 3:15 A.M. The driver wasnt speeding, but the absence of a tag was in itself a minor violation, and they turned the flashers on, prepared to write a quick citation.

Curiously, though, the driver of the pickup did not stop. He didnt speed up, either, but he kept on driving. When the troopers used their siren, he appeared oblivious; likewise when Ruane got on the loudspeaker and ordered him to stop. Ten minutes later, with a call for reinforcements on the air, their quarry missed a turn and crashed into a lamp post at a Mineola intersection. Faced with pistols now, the solemn driver gave his license up and stepped out of the car.

By that time, Ruane and Spaargaren had smelled his reeking cargo, moving toward the rear bed of the truck, where something long and thick was wrapped in plastic, bound with rope. A peek inside the tarp revealed a womans decomposing body. Motorist Joel Rifkin, now in handcuffs, helped identify the corpse as 22-year-old Tiffany Bresciani. She was a prostitute, he told the officers. I had sex with her, and then I killed her. He was on his way to dump the body near Republic Airport, he explained, when he was spotted by Ruane and Spaargaren. The case was open-and-shut ... but it was far from simple. In custody, Rifkin soon began confessing to other homicides, a total of seventeen, including Bresciani. The murders spanned four years, and all the victims were described as prostitutes by Rifkin, though surviving relatives of several vocally dispute his claim. Whatever their employment status, there was no doubt of the body count--unless, some officers suggested, Rifkins estimate was low. The son of unwed teenage parents, born in 1959, Joel was adopted by Ben and Jeanne Rifkin at three weeks of age. The couple was so happy with their son that they repeated the procedure, with a daughter, three years later. In 1965, the family settled in East Meadow, where Joel would spend most of his remaining years. He shared his mothers enthusiasm for photography and handicrafts, a brainy child who never quite fit in with other kids his age. Despite a tested IQ of 128, Joel did poorly in school, at least part of his problem traceable to the merciless teasing of class-mates. They called him The Turtle, mimicking his slouched posture and slow footsteps, seldom missing a chance to make him the butt of cruel jokes. Rifkin graduated from high school in 1977, but he could never quite cut in college, despite sporadic attempts over the next twelve years. He drifted in and out of jobs, mostly living at home, enjoying one brief relationship with a girl who recalls him as sweet, but always depressed. In February 1987, Rifkins father killed himself to end the pain of cancer, and Joel delivered the eulogy at his funeral. Things seemed to go downhill from there. On August 22, 1987, Rifkin was arrested in Hempstead, Long Island, for soliciting a prostitute. He paid a fine and managed to conceal the incident from his mother, ranging farther afield to seek hookers in Manhattan when he felt the urge. On the side, he began collecting books and press clippings on serial killers of whores, including the unidentified Green River Killer and New Yorks own Arthur Shawcross. Somewhere along the way, he moved from abstract study of the killers into emulation of their brutal crimes.

Rifkins first two victims have never been found or identified. He recalls killing one hooker in 1989 and another in 1990, dismembering their bodies and dropping the pieces into Manhattan canals, but the butcher work repulsed him, and he didnt really hit his stride until 1991. On July 14 of that year, 31-year-old Barbara Jacobs was found, strangled and rotting, in the Hudson River; her body had been wedged inside a plastic bag, then forced into a cardboard box. Another 31-year-old victim, Korean hooker Yun Lee, was fished out of the East River on September 23, her body folded inside a steamer trunk. Mary Ellen DeLuca, age twenty- two, had been missing for a month when her nude, strangled body was found in a field upstate, at Cornwall, New York. Lorraine Orvieto, age twenty-eight, was strangled by Rifkin a few days before Christmas, jammed in a 55-gallon oil drum and dropped into Coney Island Creek, where her body would remain undiscovered for over six months.

The oil drum was a new kink with Rifkin, used at least four times by his count. A Jane Doe victim, thus entombed, was dredged from Newtown Creek, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on May 13, 1992. Maryann Holloman, age 39, was retrieved from Coney Island Creek in her oil drum on July 9, two days before passers-by found the skeletal remains of Lorraine Orvieto nearby. There was another oil drum victim, Joel insists, although he doesnt know her name and cant recall exactly when he dropped her body in the Harlem River.

Still, Rifkin liked to vary his technique from time to time. With 25-year-old Iris Sanchez, strangled in April 1992, he simply drove to JFK Airport and left her body in a vacant lot, beneath a mattress. (It was still there, waiting for detectives, at the time of Joels arrest.) On May 25, 1992, he strangled crack addict Anna Lopez, dumping her corpse in some woods off Interstate 84, in Brewster. New York. Jenny Soto was the fighter, breaking off her fingernails on Rifkins face before he snapped her neck on November 16, 1992. Three months later, he killed Leah Evens and left her in rural Northampton, where her skeleton was found on Mothers Day. With Joels confession in hand, police descended on Jeanne Rifkins home, scouring the premises for evidence. In Joels room, they struck pay dirt, recovering dozens of ID cards, drivers licenses and credit cards, photographs, articles of jewelry, and piles of womens clothing taken from his victims. Out in the garage, they found a wheelbarrow and a chainsaw stained with human gore. Neighbors had noted a foul odor emanating from the Rifkin garage, where corpses were occasionally stored before disposal, but the stench was attributed to fertilizer and insecticide Joel used on his landscaping job.

Despite his confessions and the overwhelming evidence against him, Rifkin pled not guilty at his murder trial. Conviction was a foregone conclusion, However, and in the absence of a death penalty statute, he received the maximum sentence of twenty-five years to life. In early 1994, it was reported that Rifkin had engaged in a jailhouse scuffle with mass murderer Colin Ferguson over the use of a public telephone. The argument over whose killings were better reportedly ended when Ferguson punched Rifkin in the mouth.

ALEXANDER PICHUSHKIN

2010-12-21T15:51:00.000-08:00

Known as the Chessboard Killer, Alexander Pichushkin was convicted of murdering 48 people in Moscow in 2007. He appeared to be in competition with one of Russia’s most well-known serial killers, Andrei Chikatilo, who was convicted of 52 murders in 1992.

Little is known of Pichushkin's early years. He had some type of head injury around the age of four and spent time in an institute for the disabled as a child.

Around the time of Chikatilo's trial in 1992, Pichushkin committed his first murder. He was just a teenager when he pushed a boy out of a window, according to Pichushkin's televised confession. While the police did question him in the case, it was later declared a suicide. "This first murder, it's like first love, it's unforgettable," he later said.

Pichushkin's murderous impulses lay dormant for years until he began killing people in Moscow's Bittsevsky Park in the early 2000s. Often targeting the elderly or the destitute, he lured his victims to the park to reportedly drink with him at his dead dog's grave. There appears to be some kernel of truth to this story. After the loss of his grandfather, with whom he shared a close bond, Pichushkin became depressed. He got a dog that he often walked in the park. It is unknown whether the dog is actually buried there, however.

Pichushkin waited until his intended victim was intoxicated and then he hit him or her repeatedly with a blunt instrument—a hammer or a piece of pipe. To conceal the bodies, he often threw his victims into a sewer pit. Some of them were still alive at the time and ended up drowning.

As the killings progressed, Pichushkin's attacks grew even more savage. He left a broken vodka bottle sticking out of some victims' skulls and seemed to care less about disposing of the bodies, just leaving them out in the open to be discovered. By 2003, Moscow residents—especially those that lived near the park—feared that there was a serial killer on the loose. Newspapers nicknamed Pichushkin the "Bittsevsky Maniac" and "The Bittsa Beast."

Authorities finally caught up with Pichushkin in June 2006 after he killed a woman he worked with at a supermarket. She had left a note for her son to tell him that she was taking a walk with Pichushkin. While he was aware of the risks involved in killing his co-worker, he still murdered her.

After his arrest, the police discovered a chessboard with dates on 61 or 62 of its 64 squares. Pichushkin was a fan of the game and had been trying to kill as many people as there were squares on the board. Despite the date references, the police were only able to charge Pichushkin with 51 counts of murder and attempted murder (three of his victims survived).

Pichushkin's confession was aired on Russian television. In it, he discussed at length his need to kill. "For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you," Pichushkin reportedly said. Showing no remorse, he later argued that he should be charged with more murders, keeping with his claim of killing 61 or 63 people (his story varied). "I thought it would be unfair to forget about the other 11 people," Pichushkin reportedly commented during his 2007 trial.

Pichushkin was convicted in October 2007. The jury deliberated for only three hours before finding him guilty of 48 counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder. Shortly after the trial, Pichushkin was sentenced to life in prison. The hideous nature of his crimes has renewed interest in re-instituting Russia's death penalty.

TED BUNDY

2010-12-21T13:55:00.001-08:00

Ted Bundy is a striking contrast to the general image of a "homicidal maniac": attractive, self-assured, politically ambitious, and successful with a wide variety of women. But his private demons drove him to extremes of violence that make the gory worst of modern "slasher" films seem almost petty by comparison. With his chameleon-like ability to blend, his talent for belonging, Bundy posed an ever-present danger to the pretty, dark-haired women he selected as his victims.

Linda Healy was the first fatality. On January 31, 1974, she vanished from her basement lodgings in Seattle, leaving bloody sheets behind, a blood-stained nightgown hanging in her closet. Several blocks away, young Susan Clarke had been assaulted, bludgeoned in her bed a few weeks earlier, but she survived her crushing injuries and would eventually recover. As for Lynda Healy, she was gone without a trace.

Police had no persuasive evidence of any pattern yet, but it would not be long in coming. On March 12, Donna Gail Manson disappeared en route to a concert in Olympia, Washington. On April 17, Susan Rancourt vanished on her way to see a German language film in Ellensburg. On May 6, Roberta Parks failed to return from a latenight stroll in her Corvallis neighborhood. On June 1, Brenda Ball left Seattle's Flame Tavern with an unknown man and vanished, as if into thin air. Ten days later, Georgann Hawkins joined the list of missing women, lost somewhere between her boyfriend's apartment and her own sorority house in Seattle.

Now detectives had their pattern. All the missing women had been young, attractive, with their dark hair worn at shoulder length or longer, parted in the middle. In their photos, laid out side-by-side, they might have passed for sisters, some for twins. Homicide investigators had no corpses yet, but they refused to cherish false illusions of a happy ending to the case. There were so many victims, and the worst was yet to come.

July 14 a crowd assembled on the shores of Lake Sammamish to enjoy the sun and water sports of summer. When the day was over, two more names would be appended to the growing list of missing women: Janice Ott and Denise Naslund had each disappeared within sight of their separate friends, but this time police had a tenuous lead. Passers-by remembered seeing Janice Ott in conversation with a man who carried one arm in a sling; he had been overheard to introduce himself as "Ted." With that report in hand, detectives turned up other female witnesses who were themselves approached by "Ted" at Lake Sammamish. In each case, he had asked for help securing a sailboat to his car. The lucky women had declined, but one had followed "Ted" to where his small Volkswagen "bug" was parked; there was no sign of any sailboat, and his explanation -- that the boat would have to be retrieved from a house "up the hill" -- had aroused her suspicions, prompting her to put the stranger off.

Police now had a fair description of their suspect and his car. The published references to "Ted" inspired a rash of calls reporting "suspects," one of them in reference to college student Theodore Bundy. The authorities checked out each lead as time allowed, but Bundy was considered "squeaky clean;" a law student and Young Republican active in law-and-order politics, he once had chased a mugger several blocks to make a citizen's arrest. So many calls reporting suspects had been made from spite or simple over zealousness, and Bundy's name was filed away with countless others, momentarily forgotten.

On September 7, hunters found a makeshift graveyard on a wooded hillside several miles from Lake Sammamish. Dental records were required to finally identify remains of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund; the skeleton of a third woman, found with the others, could not be identified. Five weeks later, on October 12, another hunter found the bones of two more women in Clark County. One victim was identified as Carol Valenzuela, missing for two months from Vancouver, Washington, on the Oregon border; again, the second victim would remain unknown, recorded in the files as a "Jane Doe." Police were optimistic, hopeful that discovery of victims would eventually lead them to the killer, but they had no way of knowing that their man had given them the slip already, moving on in search of safer hunting grounds and other prey.

The terror came to Utah on October 2, 1974, when Nancy Wilcox disappeared in Salt Lake City. On October 18, Melissa Smith vanished in Midvale; her body, raped and beaten, would be unearthed in the Wasatch Mountains nine days later. Laura Aime joined the missing list in Orem, on October 31, while walking home in costume from a Halloween party; a month would pass before her battered, violated body was discovered in a wooded area outside of town. A man attempted to abduct attractive Carol Da Ronch from a Salt Lake City shopping mall November 8, but she was able to escape before he could attach a pair of handcuffs to her wrists. That evening, Debbie Kent was kidnapped from the auditorium at Salt Lake City's Viewmont High School.

Authorities in Utah kept communications open with police in other states, including Washington. They might have noticed that a suspect from Seattle, one Ted Bundy, was attending school in Utah when the local disappearances occurred, but they were looking for a madman, rather than a sober, well-groomed student of the law who seemed to have political connections in Seattle. Bundy stayed on file, and was again forgotten.

With the new year, Colorado joined the list of hunting grounds for an elusive killer who apparently selected victims by their hairstyles . Caryn Campbell was the first to vanish, from a ski lodge at Snowmass on January 12; her raped and battered body would be found on February 17. On March 15, Julie Cunningham disappeared en route to a tavern in Vail. One month later to the day, Melanie Cooley went missing while riding her bicycle in Nederland; she was discovered eight days later, dead, her skull crushed, with her jeans pulled down around her ankles. On July 1, Shelly Robertson was added to the missing list in Golden; her remains were found on August 23, discarded in a mine shaft near the Berthoud Pass.

A week before the final, grim discovery, Ted Bundy was arrested in Salt Lake City for suspicion of burglary. Erratic driving had attracted the attention of police, and an examination of his car -- a small VW -- revealed peculiar items such as handcuffs and a pair of panty hose with eyeholes cut to form a stocking mask. The glove compartment yielded gasoline receipts and maps that linked the suspect with a list of Colorado ski resorts, including Vail and Snowmass. Carol Da Ronch identified Ted Bundy as the man who had attacked her in November, and her testimony was sufficient to convict him on a charge of attempted kidnapping. Other states were waiting for a shot at Bundy now, and in January 1977 he was extradited to Colorado for trial in the murder of Caryn Campbell, at Snowmass.

Faced with prison time already, Bundy had no time to spare for further trials. He fled from custody in June, and was recaptured after eight days on the road. On December 30 he tried again, with more success, escaping all the way to Tallahassee, Florida, where he found lodgings on the outskirts of Florida State University. Suspected in a score of deaths already, Bundy had secured himself another happy hunting ground.

In the small hours of January 15, 1978, he invaded the Chi Omega sorority house, dressed all in black and armed with a heavy wooden club. Before he left, two women had been raped and killed, a third severely injured by the beating he inflicted with his bludgeon. Within the hour, he had slipped inside another house, just blocks away, to club another victim in her bed. She, too, survived. Detectives at the Chi Omega house discovered bite marks on the corpses there, appalling evidence of Bundy's fervor at the moment of the kill.

On February 6, Ted stole a van and drove to Jacksonville, where he was spotted in the act of trying to abduct a schoolgirl. Three days later, twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach disappeared from a schoolyard nearby; she was found in the first week of April, her body discarded near Suwanee State Park.

Police in Pensacola spotted Bundy's stolen license plates on February 15, and were forced to run him down as he attempted to escape on foot. Once Bundy was identified, impressions of his teeth were taken to compare with bite marks on the Chi Omega victims, and his fate was sealed. Convicted on two counts of murder in July 1979, he was sentenced to die in Florida's electric chair . A third conviction and death sentence were subsequently obtained in the case of Kimberly Leach.

After ten years of appeals, Bundy was finally executed in January 24, 1989. In his last interview, he confessed to a total of 28 murders.

ALBERT FISH

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Born Hamilton Fish, in 1870, America's most notorious 20th-century cannibal was the product of a respected family living in Washington, D.C. A closer examination, however, reveals at least seven relatives with severe mental disorders in the two generations preceding Fish's birth, including two members of the family who died in institutions. Fish was five years old when his father died, and his mother placed him in an orphanage while she worked to support herself. Records describe young Fish as a problem child who "ran away every Saturday," persistently wetting the bed until his eleventh year. Graduating from public school at age 15 he began to call himself "Albert," discarding the hated first name which led classmates to tease him, calling him "Ham and Eggs."

As an adult, Fish worked odd jobs , making his way across country as an itinerant house painter and decorator. In 1898 he married a woman nine years his junior fathering six children before his wife ran away with a boarder named John Straube, in January 1917. She came back once, with Straube in tow, and Fish took her back on the condition that she send her lover away. Later, he discovered that his wife was keeping Straube in the attic, and she departed after a stormy argument, never to return.

By his own account, Fish committed his first murder in 1910, killing a man in Wilmington, Delaware, but his children marked the obvious change in Fish's behavior from the date of his wife's first departure. Apparently subject to hallucinations, he would shake his fist at the sky and repeatedly scream, "I am Christ!" Obsessed with sin, sacrifice, and atonement through pain, Fish encouraged his children and their friends to paddle him until his buttocks bled. On his own, he inserted numerous needles in his groin, losing track of some as they sank out of sight. (A prison X-ray revealed at least 29 separate needles, some eroded with time to mere fragments.) On other occasions, Fish would soak cotton balls in alcohol, insert them in his anus, and set them on fire. Frustrated by agony when he began slipping needles under his own fingernails, Fish lamented, "If only pain were not so painful!"

Though never divorced from his first wife, Fish married three more times, enjoying a sex life which court psychiatrists would describe as one of "unparalleled perversity." (In jail, authorities compiled a list of eighteen sexual perversions practiced by Fish, including coprophagia -- the consumption of human excrement.) Tracing his sadomasochism back to the age of five or six, when he began to relish bare-bottom paddlings in the orphanage, Fish's obsession with pain was focused primarily on children. Ordered "by God" to castrate young boys, he impartially molested children of both sexes as he traveled around the country. Prosecutors confidently linked him with "at least 100" sexual attacks in 23 states, from New York to Wyoming, but Fish felt slighted by their estimate. "I have had children in every state," he declared, placing his own tally of victims closer to 400.

For all that, Fish was careless in his crimes, frequently losing jobs "because things about these children came out." Arrested eight times over the years, he served time for grand larceny, passing bad checks and violating parole or probation. Obscene letters were another of his passions, and Fish mailed off countless examples to strangers, their addresses obtained from matrimonial agencies or newspaper "lonely-hearts" columns.

In 1928, posing as "Mr. Howard," Fish befriended the Budd family in White Plains, New York. On June 3, while escorting 12-year-old Grace Budd to a mythical children's party, he took the child to an isolated cottage and there dismembered her body, saving several pieces for a stew which he consumed.

Two years later, with the Budd case still unsolved, Fish was confined to a psychiatric hospital for the first time. After two months of observation, he was discharged with a note reading: "Not insane; psychopathic personality; sexual type." In 1931, arresting Fish once more on a charge of mailing obscene letters, police found a well-used cat-o'-nine-tails in his room. He was released after two more weeks of observation in a psychiatric ward.

Compelled to gloat about his crimes, Fish sent a letter to the Budd family in 1934, breaking the news that Grace was dead, oddly emphasizing the fact that "she died a virgin." Traced by police through the letter, Fish readily confessed to other homicides, including children killed in 1919, 1927, and 1934.

Authorities disagreed on his ultimate body-count, detectives listing at least three more victims in New York City. Arrested for questioning in one case, Fish had been released because he "looked so innocent." On another occasion, a trolley conductor identified Fish as the man he saw with a small, sobbing boy on the day of the child's disappearance. A court psychiatrist suspected Albert of at least five murders, with New York detectives adding three more, and a justice of the New York Supreme Court was "reliably informed" of the killer's involvement in fifteen homicides.

At trial, the state was desperate to win a death penalty, overriding Fish's insanity defense with laughable psychiatric testimony. Speaking for the state, a battery of doctors declared, straight-faced, that "Coprophagia is a common sort of thing. We don't call people who do that mentally sick. A man who does that is socially perfectly all right. As far as his social status is concerned, he is supposed to be normal, because the State of New York Mental Hygiene Department also approves of that."

With Fish's rambling, obscene confessions in hand, the jury found him sane and guilty of premeditated murder. Sentenced to die, Fish was electrocuted at Sing Sing prison on January 16, 1936. It took two jolts before the chair, short-circuited by all the needles Fish had planted in his body, could complete its work.