It was an address that would become infamous. 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester. Home to jobbing builder Fred West, his wife Rose and an assortment of mutilated corpses. During the sixteen gruesome years until 1987, the couple brutally, sadistically and cruelly murdered the victims, including their own children. Sex obsessed Rose sold her body and bedded her lodgers while Fred, a modern day Marquis de Sade, tortured and raped then dug and buried, dismembering bodies to try preventing identification should they be found. Together they trawled the streets looking for new fodder to satisfy their warped lusts. Finally, a chance remark led to the evil being uncovered. Fred delivered himself to the Devil but the law decreed Rose should wait for her reunion with her monster husband.
Doctor Harold Shipman believed he was God, all-knowing and wise, a supreme being who set out to demonstrate his superiority over others through an ability to murder. His victims were usually elderly, vulnerable and trusting. Some needed help to ease the pain that came with age. Others simply sought re-assurance. All received a death sentence from the man who had taken an oath to save life. From his practice in a Cheshire market town, Shipman achieved infamy as Britain's worst ever serial killer. Officially his victims numbered 15. But he murdered at least 215 times and possibly 1,000. His own greed finally snared Doctor Death, whose evil was exposed through the love of a daughter for her mother, sending him on the path to Hell.
Albert Henry DeSalvo (September 3, 1931 – November 25, 1973) was a criminal in Boston, Massachusetts, who confessed to being the "Boston Strangler", the murderer of thirteen women in the Boston area. DeSalvo was not imprisoned for these murders, however, but for a series of rapes. His murder confession has been disputed and debate continues as to which crimes DeSalvo had actually committed.
David Richard Berkowitz (born Richard David Falco; June 1, 1953), also known as the Son of Sam and the .44 Caliber Killer, is an American serial killer convicted of a series of shooting attacks that began in the summer of 1976. Perpetrated with a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver, the shootings continued for over a year, leaving six victims dead and seven others wounded. As the toll mounted, Berkowitz eluded a massive police manhunt while leaving brazen letters which promised further murders. Highly publicized in the press, the killings terrorized New York City and achieved worldwide notoriety.
Dennis Andrew Nilsen (born 23 November 1945) is a serial killer and necrophiliac, also known as the Muswell Hill Murderer and the Kindly Killer, who committed the murders of a minimum of 12[1] young men in a series of killings committed between 1978 and 1983 in London, England.
The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who operated in northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The killer's identity remains unknown. The Zodiac murdered victims in Benicia, Vallejo, Lake Berryessa, and San Francisco between December 1968 and October 1969. Four men and three women between the ages of 16 and 29 were targeted. The killer originated the name "Zodiac" in a series of taunting letters sent to the local Bay Area press. These letters included four cryptograms (or ciphers). Of the four cryptograms sent, only one has been definitively solved.[1]
Steven Gerald James Wright (born 24 April 1958) is an English serial killer, also known as the Suffolk Strangler. He is currently serving life imprisonment for the murder of five women who worked as prostitutes in Ipswich, Suffolk. The killings took place during late 2006 and Wright was found guilty in February 2008.
Aileen Carol Wuornos (February 29, 1956 – October 9, 2002) was an American serial killer who killed seven men in Florida in 1989 and 1990. Wuornos claimed that her victims had either raped or attempted to rape her while she was working as a prostitute, and that all of the homicides were committed in self-defense. She was convicted and sentenced to death for six of the murders and was executed by the State of Florida by lethal injection on October 9, 2002.
Charles Milles Manson (born November 12, 1934) is an American criminal and musician who led what became known as the Manson Family, a quasi-commune that arose in the California desert, in the late-1960s. In 1971 he was found guilty of conspiracy to commit the murders of seven people, actress Sharon Tate and four other people at Tate's home, and the next day, a married couple, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, all carried out by members of the group at his instruction. He was convicted of the murders through the joint-responsibility rule, which makes each member of a conspiracy guilty of crimes his fellow conspirators commit in furtherance of the conspiracy's objective
Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (May 21, 1960 – November 28, 1994), also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal, was an American serial killer and sex offender, who committed the rape, murder and dismemberment of 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, with many of his later murders also involving necrophilia, cannibalism and the permanent preservation of body parts—typically all or part of the skeletal structure
Peter William Sutcliffe (born 2 June 1946) is a British serial killer who was dubbed by the press "The Yorkshire Ripper" during his crime spree. In 1981 Sutcliffe was convicted of murdering 13 women and attempting to murder seven others.
Johann "Jack" Unterweger (16 August 1950 – 29 June 1994) was an Austrian serial killer who murdered prostitutes in several countries. First convicted of a 1974 murder, he was released in 1990 as an example of rehabilitation. He became a journalist and minor celebrity, but within months started killing again. He committed suicide following a conviction for several murders. Austrian psychiatrist Dr. Reinhard Haller diagnosed him with narcissistic personality disorder in 1994
Edward Theodore "Ed" Gein (August 8, 1906 – July 26, 1984) was an American murderer and body snatcher. His crimes, committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety after authorities discovered Gein had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin. Gein confessed to killing two women – tavern owner Mary Hogan on December 8, 1954, and a Plainfield hardware store owner, Bernice Worden, on November 16, 1957. Initially found unfit for trial, after confinement in a mental health facility he was tried in 1968 for the murder of Worden and sentenced to life imprisonment, which he spent in a mental hospital.
Theodore Robert "Ted" Bundy (born Theodore Robert Cowell; November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer, rapist, kidnapper, and necrophile who assaulted and murdered numerous young women and girls during the 1970s and possibly earlier. After more than a decade of denials, he confessed shortly before his execution to 30 homicides committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978; the true total remains unknown, and could be much higher.
Anatoly Yuriyovych Onoprienko (Ukrainian: Анатолій Юрійович Онопрієнко July 25, 1959 – August 27, 2013) was a Ukrainian serial killer and mass murderer.[2] He is also known by the nicknames "The Beast of Ukraine", "The Terminator", and "Citizen O". After police arrested the 37-year-old former forestry student on April 16, 1996, Onoprienko confessed to killing 52 people
Ricardo Leyva "Richard" Muñoz Ramírez (February 29, 1960 – June 7, 2013) was an American serial killer, rapist, and burglar. His highly publicized home invasion crime spree terrorized the residents of the greater Los Angeles area, and later the residents of the San Francisco area, from June 1984 until August 1985. Prior to his capture, Ramirez was dubbed the "Night Stalker" by the news media. He used a wide variety of weapons, including handguns, knives, a machete, a tire iron, and a hammer. Ramirez, who was an avowed Satanist, never expressed any remorse for his crimes
Women who kill. They often target those closest to them; partners, family members, friends. Columbia forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Stone uses his scale of evil to understand the minds and motives of women who commit murder
Paul Kenneth Bernardo, also known as Paul Jason Teale[1] (born 27 August 1964), is a Canadian serial killer and rapist, known for the highly publicized sexual assaults and murders he committed with his wife Karla Homolka and the serial rapes he committed in the east-Metropolitan Toronto city of Scarborough.
John Wayne Gacy, Jr. (March 17, 1942 – May 10, 1994), also known as the Killer Clown, was an American serial killer and rapist who was convicted of the sexual assault and murder of a minimum of 33 teenage boys and young men in a series of killings committed between 1972 and 1978 in Chicago, Illinois.
Marc Dutroux (born 6 November 1956) is a Belgian serial killer and child molester, convicted of having kidnapped, tortured and sexually abused six girls from 1995 to 1996, ranging in age from 8 to 19, four of whom he murdered. He was also convicted of having killed a suspected former accomplice, Bernard Weinstein, later proved insane. He was arrested in 1996, four years after the disappearance of his victims had begun, and has been in prison ever since, though he briefly escaped in April 1998.
The Backpacker murders is the name given to a spate of serial killings that occurred in New South Wales, Australia during the 1990s. The bodies of seven missing young people aged 19 to 22 were discovered partly buried in the Belanglo State Forest, 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) south west of the New South Wales town of Berrima. Five of the victims were international backpackers visiting Australia (three German, two British), and two were Australian travellers from Melbourne.
The Monster of Florence, also known as Il Mostro, is an epithet commonly used for the perpetrator, or perpetrators, of 16 murders, nearly all of couples, that took place between 1968 and 1985[1] in the province of Florence, Italy. The same gun and pattern were used in all the murders.
Dennis Lynn Rader (born March 9, 1945) is an American serial killer who murdered ten people in Sedgwick County (in and around Wichita, Kansas), between 1974 and 1991. He is known as the BTK killer (or the BTK strangler). "BTK" stands for "Bind, Torture, Kill", which was his infamous signature. He sent letters describing the details of the killings to police and local news outlets during the time period in which the murders took place.
Jack the Ripper is the best-known name given to an unidentified serial killer who was active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. The name originated in a letter written by someone claiming to be the murderer that was widely disseminated in the media. The letter is widely believed to have been a hoax, and may have been written by a journalist in a deliberate attempt to heighten interest in the story. Within the crime case files as well as journalistic accounts the killer was known as "the Whitechapel Murderer" as well as "Leather Apron".
Although there are a few people in real life who might actually be calm and methodical when going about a murder—true psychopaths don't feel empathy, which could dull their response to the violence of a murder, and some people who have suffered damage to the amygdala are unable to feel fear—those are extremely rare cases.
