The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs is the media epithet for the killers responsible for a string of brutal murders in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in June and July 2007. The case gained additional notoriety due to the fact that the killers made video recordings of some of the murders, with one of the videos leaking to the Internet. Two 19-year-old locals, Viktor Sayenko and Igor Suprunyuck, were arrested and charged with 21 murders. A third co-conspirator, Alexander Hanzha, was charged with two armed robberies that took place before the murder spree. On February 11, 2009, all three defendants were found guilty. Suprunyuck and Sayenko were sentenced to life imprisonment, while Hanzha received nine years in prison.

The story in brief

• Killed 21 people, they started with small animals and moved to humans
• One of the victims was a pregnant woman; her fetus was cut out of her womb. No sexual assaults on any victims were reported
• Later on one of the suspects quit and 2 guys continued to murder. Also they attended funerals of their victims, and took pics
• They are thought to have used iron pipes and hammers on their victims. Mobile phone footage also suggests they practiced on cats, dogs and other animals first
• They all come from rich families and have allegedly admitted they committed the crimes just for fun
• Detectives say that the killers weren’t targeting anyone in particular. They just picked up people who looked like they wouldn’t fight back
• 12 murders were filmed, over 300 photos were presented in court. First victim was killed with metal rods, but it took some time so they moved to hammers

Motive

The prosecution did not establish a specific motive behind the killings. Local media reported that the killers had a plan to get rich from the murder videos that they recorded although they come from very rich and powerful families. One of the suspects’ girlfriends reported that they were planning to make forty videos of separate murders. This was corroborated by the suspects’ former classmate, who claimed that he often heard Suprunyuck was in contact with an unknown “rich foreign website operator” who ordered forty snuff videos, and would pay a large sum of money once they were made. Regional security chief Ivan Stupak rejected the claim that the murders had been committed to make Internet snuff videos, saying that no evidence had come to light during the investigation that supported the claim. Detective Bogdan Vlasenko stated: “We think they were doing it as a hobby, to have a collection of memories when they get old.” Deputy interior minister Nikolay Kupyanskiy commented “For these young men, murder was like entertainment or hunting.”

At the trial, it emerged that Suprunyuck had collected newspaper cuttings about the case. Some of the photographs of the crimes had captions added, including “The weak must die. The strongest will conquer.”

So obviously they were just having fun.

I accidentally saw the video and it was so sickening. Why would anyone put this on the Internet?!

Carol Bundy and Doug Clark became known as “The Sunset Strip Killers” after being convicted of a series of murders in Los Angeles during the late spring and early summer of 1980. The victims were young prostitutes or runaways.

Bundy, a divorcee with two children living in the San Fernando Valley, went to police claiming that her lover, Clark, had told her he had killed several young women. All had been shot with a gun Bundy had purchased. Bundy claimed initially that she knew nothing of the murders, “only what (Clark) told me”.

Shortly before going to police, Bundy, who worked as a nurse, had shot to death, stabbed and beheaded another lover, Jack Murray. Bundy eventually confessed to that murder but claimed it was self-defense. Later, Bundy also admitted that she had been present during one of the murders for which Clark was charged. That murder took place in a car parked behind a gas station in East Hollywood. Bundy claimed Clark shot a prostitute in the head while the prostitute was in the act of fellatio. Bundy had hired the girl for Clark’s birthday. Clark insisted Bundy was the shooter. Both agreed that they had disposed of the body together.

Clark has always claimed that Bundy and Murray committed the murders and he was merely Bundy’s fall guy.

Clark’s trial was a pitch-black portrait of the San Fernando Valley underworld of the late 1970s, a world in which Bundy and Clark went on endless sexual adventures. Clark himself had engaged in a long sexual relationship with the 13-year-old girl who babysat Bundy’s children. However, the highlight of the trial was Bundy’s account of how Clark had taken the head off one of his victims, had oral sex with it in a shower and stored it in his ice box. Bundy’s testimony was critical; all other evidence introduced against Clark was circumstantial. Moreover, no forensic examination was ever performed comparing the body of the girl who had been beheaded with Murray’s body.

The evidence included a piece of bloody scalp found in the ceiling of Murray’s van. That evidence was mentioned but not introduced at Clark’s trial. Bundy plea bargained and, in return for her testimony, received a moderated sentence.

Albert Henry DeSalvo was a criminal in Boston, Massachusetts who confessed to being the “Boston Strangler”, the murderer of 13 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 regarding which crimes DeSalvo actually committed.

DeSalvo was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts to Frank and Charlotte DeSalvo. His father was a violent alcoholic who at one point beat all of his wife’s teeth out and bent her fingers back until they broke. He also forced his children to watch him have sex with prostitutes he brought home. DeSalvo tortured animals as a child and began shoplifting and stealing in early adolescence, frequently crossing paths with the law.

Murders

Between June 14, 1962, and January 4, 1964, 13 single women between the ages of 19 and 85 were murdered in the Boston area; they were eventually tied to the Boston Strangler. Most of the women were sexually assaulted in their apartments, and then strangled with articles of clothing. The eldest victim died of a heart attack. Two others were stabbed to death, one of whom was also badly beaten. Without any sign of forced entry into their dwellings, the women were assumed to have either known their killer or voluntarily allowed him into their homes.

The police were not convinced all of these murders were the work of a single individual, especially because of the wide gap in the victims’ ages; much of the public believed the crimes were committed by one person, however.

On October 27, 1964, a stranger entered a young woman’s home in East Cambridge posing as a maintenance worker sent up by the building supervisor. He tied his victim to her bed, proceeded to sexually assault her, and suddenly left, saying “I’m sorry” as he went. The woman’s description led police to identify the assailant as DeSalvo and when his photo was published, many women identified him as the man who had assaulted them. Earlier on October 27, DeSalvo had posed as a motorist with car trouble and attempted to enter a home in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. The homeowner, future Brockton Police Chief Richard Sproles, became suspicious and eventually fired a shotgun at DeSalvo.

DeSalvo was not initially suspected of being involved with the murders. Only after he was charged with rape did he give a detailed confession of his activities as the Boston Strangler under hypnosis induced by William Joseph Bryan and sessions not induced by hypnosis with Assistant Attorney General John Bottomly. He initially confessed to fellow inmate George Nassar; he then reported to his attorney F. Lee Bailey, who took on DeSalvo’s case. Though there were some inconsistencies, DeSalvo was able to cite details which had not been made public. However, there was no physical evidence to substantiate his confession. As such, he stood trial for earlier, unrelated crimes of robbery and sexual offenses. Bailey brought up the confession to the murders as part of his client’s history at the trial as part of an insanity defense, but it was ruled as inadmissible by the judge.

Imprisonment and death

DeSalvo was sentenced to life in prison in 1967. In February of that year, he escaped with two fellow inmates from Bridgewater State Hospital, triggering a full scale manhunt. A note was found on his bunk addressed to the superintendent. In it, DeSalvo stated he had escaped to focus attention on the conditions in the hospital and his own situation. The day after the escape, he turned himself in to his lawyer in nearby Lynn, Massachusetts. Following the escape, he was transferred to the maximum security prison known at the time as Walpole where he was found murdered six years later in the infirmary. Robert Wilson, who was associated with the Winter Hill Gang was tried for the murder of DeSalvo, but the trial ended in a hung jury. No one was ever found guilty of the murder.

In 1971, the Texas legislature unanimously passed a resolution honoring DeSalvo in an April Fool’s Day joke made by Waco Representative Tom Moore, Jr.. Moore admitted to the joke–made to prove his colleagues were not putting due diligence into researching legislation they were passing–and withdrew the resolution.

(Not going to show you pictures of the murders… It’s really fucked up…)

Gerald Eugene Stano was an American convicted serial killer. He was born in Schenectady, New York. His given name at birth was Paul Zeininger. His natural mother neglected him to such an extent that when she finally gave him up for adoption when he was six months old, county doctors declared him unadoptable because he was functioning at what they described as “an animalistic level”, even ingesting his own feces to survive. He was eventually adopted, however, by Norma Stano, a nurse, who renamed him Gerald Eugene Stano.

By all accounts, the Stanos were loving parents, but discipline problems nevertheless plagued their adopted son all his life. He earned C’s and D’s in all subjects in school (except music, which he excelled at). He was a bed wetter until the age of 10, a trait shared among many serial killers when they were children. He lied compulsively and was once caught stealing money from his father’s wallet to pay fellow members of the track and field team to finish behind him, so he would not be viewed as a complete failure. He graduated high school at the age of 21 and did not attend college.

Officially, Stano admitted that he began killing in the early 1970s, when he was in his 20s but also claimed to have begun killing in the late 1960s, at the age of 18. Several girls had gone missing in Stano’s area of residence at that time, but since insufficient physical evidence was found when these claims were investigated almost 20 years later, Stano was never charged. He was most active in Florida and New Jersey. By his 29th birthday, he was in prison for murdering 41 women. He was housed with fellow serial killer Theodore Bundy until his execution in 1998.

Description of murders

Controversy has long accompanied Gerald Stano’s criminal history, with some believing that Stano was actually a ‘serial confessor’, including his arresting officer, Detective James Gadberry, who challenged the decision to accept Stano’s first confessions as valid and, in 1986, signed a legal affidavit stating unequivocably that Sergeant Paul Crow was responsible for “spoon feeding” Stano the intimate details of unsolved homicides. According to Gadberry’s affidavit, Stano merely parroted the information back to Crow while other veteran homicide officers later made statements to the effect that, they too, had witnessed Paul Crow ‘helping’ Stano to confess to crimes he hadn’t committed.

The Hillside Strangler is the media epithet for two men, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, cousins, who were convicted of kidnapping, raping, torturing, and killing girls and women ranging in age from 12 to 28 years old during a four-month period from late 1977 to early 1978. They committed their crimes in the hills above Los Angeles, California…

The first victim of the Hillside Strangler was a Hollywood prostitute, Yolanda Washington, whose body was found near the Forest Lawn Cemetery on October 18, 1977. The corpse was cleaned and faint marks were visible around the neck, wrists, and ankles where a rope had been used. It was discovered that the victim had been raped.

On November 1, 1977, police were called to a La Crescenta, Los Angeles, California neighborhood, north east of downtown Los Angeles, where the body of a teenage girl was found naked, face up on a parkway in a residential area. The then homeowner covered her with a tarp to protect the neighborhood children from viewing her on their way to school. Bruises on her neck indicated strangulation. The body had been dumped, indicating she was killed elsewhere. The girl was eventually identified as Judith Lynn Miller, a runaway prostitute who was barely 15 years old. This event caused the homeowner to relocate his family out of state for their protection. The coroner’s report further detailed her being bound much like the first victim, Yolanda Washington.

Five days later, on November 6, 1977, the nude body of another woman was discovered near the Chevy Chase Country Club. Similar to Judith Lynn Miller, she had been strangled with a ligature. The woman was identified as 21-year-old Lissa Teresa Kastin, a waitress, and was last seen leaving work the night before she was discovered. Whereas some of the other victims were prostitutes, Lissa Kastin was a characteristically “good girl” who had also worked part time for her father’s real estate and construction business. A ballet student, she was saving money to continue her training and hoped to become a professional dancer.

Two girls, Dolores Cepeda, 12, and Sonja Johnson,14 boarded a school bus and headed home on November 13, 1977. The last time they were seen was getting off this bus and approaching a car. Inside the car were reportedly two men. A young boy, cleaning up a trash-strewn hillside near Dodger Stadium found two bodies, six days later, November 20. Both girls had been strangled and raped, and were identified as Cepeda and Johnson.

Later that same day, November 20, 1977, hikers found the nude, sexually assaulted body of Kristina Weckler, 20, on a hillside near Glendale. Unlike previous victims, there were signs of torture, indicated by oozing injection marks. It was later revealed that Weckler had been injected with Windex.

On November 23, 1977, the badly decomposed body of Jane King, 28, an actress, was found near an off ramp of the Golden State freeway. She had gone missing around November 9. With the continued discovery of bodies in hilly areas, a task force was formed to catch the predator, dubbed the “Hillside Strangler.”

On November 29, 1977, police found the body of Lauren Wagner, 18. She also had been strangled with a ligature. There were also burn marks on her hands indicating she was tortured. The law enforcement task force — Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and Glendale Police Department — began to assume that more than one person was responsible for the murders, even though the media continued to use the singular, Hillside Strangler.

On December 13, 1977, police found the body of 17-year-old prostitute Kimberly Martin on a hillside.

The final victim in Los Angeles was discovered on February 16, 1978, when a helicopter pilot spotted an orange Datsun abandoned off a cliff in the Angeles Crest area. Police responded to the scene and found the body of the car’s owner, 20-year-old Cindy Hudspeth, in the trunk.

Some time in 1977, the two men gave a ride to Catharine Lorre with the intent of killing her as well. However, when they discovered that Catharine was the daughter of Hungarian actor Peter Lorre, famous for his role as a child murderer in Fritz Lang’s acclaimed film M, they let her go without incident. She didn’t realize who the men were until they were arrested.

John Wayne Gacy was convicted of the torture, rape and murder of 33 males between 1972 until his arrest in 1978. He was dubbed the “Killer Clown” because he entertained kids at parties as “Pogo The Clown.” He was eventually convicted and sentenced to death. On May 10, 1994, Gacy was executed by lethal injection.

Gacy’s First Known Attack

The first known account of John Gacy’s sadistic behavior began after his marriage to Marilynn Myers in 1964 in Iowa. He was working in management at his father-in-law’s restaurant and somehow lured a young boy to the back and tried to sodomize him when he refused to perform oral sex. The boy reported Gacy to the police and he ended up doing 18 months of a 10 year prison sentence on a sexual molestation conviction.

Divorced and Disgraced

After prison, divorced and disgraced, he decided to return to his hometown Chicago and start a new life. He remarried but the marriage ended quickly, leaving Gacy alone to feed his sadistic fantasies. By 1978 he was actively cruising for homesexual young men and luring them to his home where he would then torture, rape and brutally kill them.

Looking for Work

Another tactic he used to get young men to his home was through posting jobs at his construction company. He would lure them to his house on the pretext of talking to them about a job. Once the boys got inside his home he would overpower them, knock them unconscious and begin his gruesome crime of torture, rape and murder.

Care for a Cup of Coffee?

The police became suspicious of Gacy when a mother of one boy who was to meet Gacy about a job never returned home. When the police saw Gacy’s criminal record they began to keep a close eye on him. Gacy, in his usual bizarre behavior, invited the police in for coffee. The police accepted the invitation and once inside they became ovrwhelmed by a strong odor which they recognized as possibly coming from a decaying dead body.

Bodies Found Under the Crawlspace

The police then obtained a search warrant and uncovered 29 bodies in the crawlspace of Gacy’s house. The bodies were all male and ranged in age from nine years old to their mid-20s. Later Gacy admitted to more killings in which he dumped the bodies into a nearby river. In searching for all possible victims, the police excavated Gacy’s yard and gutted the house, eventually tearing it completely down.

Executed in 1994 by Lethal Injection

After he was convicted and sentenced to death in 1980, he continued to taunt authorities with different versions of his story about the murders in an attempt to stay alive. Authorities were not swayed and on May 10, 1994 his execution by lethal injection was carried out.

Armin Meiwes is a German man who achieved international notoriety for killing and eating a voluntary victim whom he had found via the Internet. After Meiwes and the victim jointly attempted to eat the victim’s severed penis, Meiwes killed his victim and proceeded to eat a large amount of his flesh. Because of his acts, Meiwes is also known as the Rotenburg Cannibal or Der Metzgermeister (The Master Butcher).

Looking for a willing victim, Meiwes posted an advertisement at a website, The Cannibal Cafe, whose disclaimer mentions the distinction between reality and fantasy. Meiwes’s post stated that he was “looking for a well-built 18 to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed”. Bernd Jürgen Brandes then answered the advertisement. Many other people responded to the advertisement, but backed out; Meiwes did not attempt to force them to do anything against their will.

As is known from a videotape the two made when they met on 9 March 2001 in Meiwes’s home in the small village of Rotenburg, Meiwes amputated Brandes’s penis and the two men attempted to eat the penis together before Brandes was killed. Brandes had insisted that Meiwes attempt to bite his penis off. This did not work and ultimately, Meiwes used a knife to remove Brandes’s penis. Brandes apparently tried to eat some of his own penis raw, but could not because it was too tough and, as he put it, “chewy”. Meiwes then fried the penis in a pan with salt, pepper, wine and garlic; he then fried it with some of Brandes’s fat but by then it was too burned to be consumed. He then chopped it up into chunks and fed it to his dog. According to journalists who saw the video (which has not been made public), Brandes may already have been too weakened from blood loss to actually eat any of his penis. Meiwes read a book for three hours, while Brandes lay bleeding in the bath. Meiwes apparently gave him large quantities of alcohol and pain killers, 20 sleeping pills and a bottle of schnapps, kissed him and finally killed him in a room that he had built in his house for this purpose, the Slaughter Room. After stabbing Brandes to death in the throat, he hung the body on a meat hook and tore chunks of flesh from it; he even tried to grind the bones to use as flour. The whole scene was recorded on the two-hour video tape. Meiwes ate the body over the next 10 months, storing body parts in his freezer under pizza boxes and consuming up to 20 kilograms (44 lb) of the flesh.

Meiwes was arrested in December 2002, after a college student in Innsbruck phoned the police after seeing new advertisements for victims and details about the killing on the Internet. Investigators searched his home and found body parts and the videotaped killing.

On 30 January 2004, Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 8 years in prison. The case attracted considerable media attention and led to a debate over whether Meiwes could be convicted at all, given that Bernd Jürgen Brandes had voluntarily and knowingly participated in the act.

Meiwes has admitted what he did, and expressed regret for his actions. He added he wanted to write a book of his life story with the aim of deterring anyone who wants to follow his steps. Websites dedicated to Meiwes have appeared, with people advertising for willing victims. “They should go for treatment, so it doesn’t escalate like it did with me”, said Meiwes. He believes there are over 100 cannibals in Germany.

Issei Sagawa is a Japanese man who in 1981 murdered and cannibalized a Dutch woman named Renée Hartevelt. After his release, he became a minor celebrity in Japan and made a living through the public’s interest in his crime.

Sagawa was born in Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan to wealthy parents. He attended college at the University of Paris.

Murder of Hartevelt

Sagawa served time in a French jail for the murder of the Dutch student Renée Hartevelt, a classmate at the Sorbonne Academy in Paris, France. On June 11, 1981, Sagawa, a 32 year old student of French literature, invited Hartevelt to dinner at his 10 Rue Erlanger apartment under the pretense of literary conversation. Upon her arrival, he shot her in the neck with a rifle while she sat with her back to him at a desk, then began to carry out his plan of eating her. She was selected because of her health and beauty, those characteristics Sagawa believed he lacked. Sagawa describes himself as a “weak, ugly, and small man” (he is just under 5 ft (1.52 m) tall) and claims that he wanted to “absorb her energy”.

Sagawa said he fainted after the shock of shooting her, but awoke with the realization that he had to carry out his desire to eat her. He did so, beginning with her hips and legs, after having sex with the corpse. In interviews, he noted his surprise at the “corn-colored” nature of human fat. For two days, Sagawa ate various parts of her body. He described the meat as “soft” and “odorless”, like tuna. He then attempted to dump the mutilated body in a remote lake, but was seen in the act and later arrested by the French police.

Haigh meticulously planned each of his murders, with all three stages carefully thought out to prevent untidy, or messy finishes to his gruesome activities.

The first stage was to isolate the victim from any familiarity around them (escorting them to his “workshop”, which was nothing more than an adjacent room next to a factory). In all of the cases, his victims were always led under a pretence of discovery, which was based upon his initial friendship established with each of them. Put quite simply, they had absolutely no reason to suspect Haigh of performing anything unusual, until it was too late.

The next stage was to cleanly render his target incapable of responding to his attack, via the use of a .38 Webley revolver. He concealed the gun upon his person once he had coaxed his intended target inside his workshop. Then Haigh would seize any opportunity to kill the victim with as little effort as possible on his part.

Finally, was the disposal of the body using vats of industrial acid. It was Haigh’s mistaken belief that a corpse could be completely disposed of via the acid. Unfortunately for Haigh, certain parts of the human body are more resilient than most people realise, either by their very nature (such as teeth and bone) and artificial items (such as false teeth) and are usually picked up as trace evidence by forensic experts. Haigh’s false assumption that murder could not be proved without the body was to have lead to his downfall.

One other key element in all the murders is the violations performed on the victims in the consumption of blood. Though the murders were very important to Haigh, he also saw the need to sustain himself financially, and would thus strip the body of any valuables that he could use himself (things such as jewellery, and ration cards which he later used for himself). These would later be found at his home, which provided further damning evidence against him.

Suspected of killing up to 15 people, he was eventually charged with just six murders. His trial began at Lewes Assizes on 18th July 1949 and finished the following afternoon. It took the jury seventeen minutes to find him guilty.

He was hanged by Pierrepoint at Wandsworth prison on 10th August 1949.

On November 9, 1930, Arnold Sodeman abducted a 12 year old schoolgirl, Mena Griffiths. He came upon his victim at the local playground playing with a group of friends. He gave the other girls some money, and told them to go to the shop to get some candy; meanwhile, he told his victim that he had a different errand for her to run. By the time the little girl’s friends returned to the playground, there was no sign of the man or their friend. Griffith’s body was discovered 2 days later at Ormond, in an abandoned building. She had been gagged, bound and strangled to death.

On January 10, 1931, he abducted a 16 year old Hazel Wilson and strangled her to death. Her body was also found in the suburb of Ormond. He had gagged both girls and tied their hands behind their backs with portions of their clothing.

Sodeman struck for the third time on January 1, 1935. His victim, Ethel Belshaw, was a 12 year old girl whom he strangled at the sea-side town of Inverloch. Belshaw was intending to buying an ice cream when she disappeared.

On December 1, 1935, Sodeman killed his fourth victim, a 6 year old girl named June Rushmer. He met her while she was walking home from a local park. Her body was found the following day less than 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from her Leongatha home. She had also been bound, gagged and strangled. Witnesses stated that they had seen the child with a man on a bicycle shortly before her disappearance.

Sodeman at the time was on a work crew repairing roadways. During a morning tea break a fellow worker jokingly stated he had seen Sodeman on his bike near the crime scene. Sodeman replied angrily that he wasn’t there. He had answered with such anger and rage, which was very out of character for him, that the workers told police.

Police rushed to Sodeman’s worksite and took him away for questioning. As soon as police had him in their custody, Sodeman confessed to the crimes. Police were initially skeptical of the confession, but Sodeman gave details of the crimes that only the killer could have known. Whilst confessing to the crimes, Sodeman told police how he would link his thumbs together to simplify the choking of his victims.

The Zodiac Killer a mysterious murderer known only as the ‘Zodiac’( signed from his taunting letters sent to newspapers), killed five people in San Francisco between December 1968 and October 1969.  The Zodiac killer selected his victims at random and killed them usually by a blitz shooting attack.

The first known murder by the Zodiac killer happened on 20 December 1968, a man approached a couple sitting in their car in Vallejo, California, and shot them dead.

On the 5 July 1969 the Zodiac struck again, shooting a couple in their car near the Vallejo area, leaving a woman dead and a man wounded.

Letters were sent to newspapers in San Francisco supposedly claiming to be from the killer, and were signed ‘Zodiac’ which was adopted by the media to name the mysterious killer.  In some of the letters there was lines in code which was decoded by an cipher expert, this read some things such as - ‘hunting humans was the most exciting of all sports’.

The Zodiac killer struck again on the 27 September 1969 at Lake Berryesa.  A hooded plump man wearing glasses held a couple at gunpoint at a picnic area and then stabbed them both, killing the woman.  The killer then notified the police with a telephone call.

The last known murder happened on the 11 October when a San Francisco taxi driver was shot dead.  A letter was sent to a San Francisco newspaper accompanied by a bloodied piece of the taxi driver’s shirt.  That was the last known murder although the Zodiac sent more letters threatening more murders.

The Zodiac Killer case remains unsolved.  It is still believed that the Zodiac Killer is continuing his tally.

This Milwaukee serial killer murdered boys of Asian and African descent. His murders were gruesome and involved torture, forced sodomy, dismemberment (removing their limbs), necrophilia, and cannibalism.

He was arrested first when caught fondling a 13-year-old boy in Milwaukee and was sentenced to one year in a work release camp. After serving ten months, he was released on probation for his good behavior. That’s when his killing spree began.

He committed his first murder at the age of 18, shortly after being released, and his first victim was a 19-year-old hitchhiker.

There was a much-talked about story about a 14-year-old boy who almost escaped Dahmer in 1991. He wandered into the streets without clothes, with Dahmer in pursuit. Police believed Dahmer’s story that the boy was 19 years old and was his partner, and took the boy to Dahmer’s house. In spite of noticing a weird smell there, they left without investigating. Soon after, the boy was killed and Dahmer kept his skull as a souvenir.

Background

Dahmer was the son of an analytical chemist, and as a child he had a fascination with dissecting dead animals. By the time he was a teenager, he was an alcoholic and a loner. He dropped out of college and his father forced him to enlist in the Army. After just two years, he was discharged because of his heavy drinking. Since he did not want to face his father, he moved in with his grandmother and lived with her for six years. His grandmother asked him to move out when he was arrested for exposing himself in public.

Killings and Sentence

Dahmer was caught by the police when a would-be victim escaped and alerted them. He was held responsible for 15 murders, sentenced to 15 life terms. Dahmer then expressed remorse and wished death upon himself. He was beaten to death by a fellow inmate and died of severe head trauma.

Someone in London murdered and mutilated a number of prostitutes during the autumn of 1888; the press went into a frenzy, politicians pointed the finger at each other, hoaxers polluted the investigation and one of several nicknames stuck: Jack the Ripper. Over a century later Jack’s identity has never been wholly proven (there isn’t even a leading suspect), most aspects of the case are still debated and the Ripper is an infamous cultural bogeyman.

The Enduring Mystery

The Ripper’s identity has never been established and people have never stopped looking: the publishing rate’s average is a new book a year since 1888. Unfortunately, the wealth of Ripper source material - letters, reports, diaries and photographs – provides enough depth for detailed and fascinating research, but too few facts for any incontrovertible conclusions; just about everything about Jack the Ripper is open to debate and the best you can get is a consensus. There is no better mystery.

The Crimes

Traditionally, Jack the Ripper is considered to have killed five women, all London prostitutes, during 1888: Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols on August 31, Annie Chapman on September 8, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes on September 30 and Mary Jane (Marie Jeanette) Kelly on November 9. In practice there is no agreed list: the most popular change is to discount Stride and/or Kelly, sometimes adding Martha Tabram, killed August 7th. Authors naming more than eight have achieved very little consensus.

The Ripper generally killed by strangling his victims, then laying them down and cutting the arteries in their throats; this was followed by a varied process of mutilation, during which parts of the body were removed and kept. Because Jack did this quickly, often in the dark, and because he seemed to have great anatomical knowledge, people have assumed the Ripper had a doctor’s or surgeon’s training. As with much of the case, there is no consensus: a contemporary thought him simply a blunderer.

The Letters and Nicknames

During the autumn and winter of 1888/89 a number of letters circulated among the police and newspapers, all claiming to be from the Whitechapel murderer; these include the ‘From Hell’ letter and one accompanied by part of a kidney. Ripperologists consider most, if not all, of the letters to be hoaxes, but their impact at the time was considerable, if only because one contained the first use of ‘Jack the Ripper’, a nickname the papers swiftly adopted and which is now synonymous.

Horror, Media and Culture

The Ripper killings were neither obscure nor ignored at the time. There was gossip and fear in the streets, questions at high levels of government, offers of rewards and resignations when nobody was caught. Political reformers used the Ripper in arguments and policemen struggled with the limited techniques of the time. Indeed, the Ripper case remained high profile enough for many of the police involved to write private accounts years later. However, it was the media who made ‘Jack the Ripper’.

By 1888 literacy was common amongst the crowded citizens of London and newspapers reacted to the Whitechapel Murderer, whom they initially christened ‘Leather Apron’, with the frenzy we expect from modern tabloids, stirring opinions, fact and theory – along with the probably hoaxed Ripper letters – together to create a legend which seeped into popular culture. From the very start, Jack doubled as a figure from the horror genre, a bogeyman to scare your kids.

A century later, Jack the Ripper is still hugely famous world over, an unknown criminal at the centre of a global manhunt. But he is more than that, he’s the focus of novels, films, musicals and even a six inch high model plastic figure. Jack the Ripper was the first serial killer adopted by the modern media age and he’s been at the forefront ever since, mirroring the evolution of western culture.

Will The Mystery Be Solved?

It’s extremely unlikely anyone will be able to use the existing evidence to prove, beyond all reasonable doubt, who Jack the Ripper was and, while people are still uncovering material, the discovery of something unarguable has to be regarded as a long-shot. Fortunately, the mystery is so fascinating because you can do your own reading, draw your own conclusions and, with some critical thinking, generally have as much chance of being right as everyone else!

On December 22, 1978, Andrei Chikatilo first experienced the thrill of killing another human being when he sexually assaulted and stabbed nine-year-old Lena Zakotnova and dumped her body into a river in the town of Shakhty, Russia. It was an experience he would duplicate more than fifty times before his long overdue capture. 

A quiet, unassuming, scholarly man, Chikatilo was impotent with women for the most part (he did eventually marry and father two children) and found out early on that violence during sex excited him beyond anything else. In the early 1970’s he began a teaching career, no doubt to enable himself to be in the company of children, his prime victim pool, on a daily basis. He embarked on a child-molesting spree at a school in Novoshaktinsk and left for Shakty in 1978 after his discretions became suspected by other students and faculty. 

Chikatilo’s murders began in earnest in 1981 when he switched jobs and became a travelling supply clerk, giving him ample free time and a larger hunting ground to find victims. His second murder occurred around the same time and Chikatilo became a literal killing machine, racking up fourteen total kills by the end of the summer. Most were lured from train and bus stops in different towns in the immediate area and most of the victims were young vagrants that were rarely missed until their corpses turned up. Chikatilo ‘s trademark was a horrifying escalation of sexual mutilation. 

Chikatilo’s kills mounted throughout the 1980’s and bodies of his victims became increasingly more and more butchered. Police could not locate their mysterious killer despite their best, though sometimes clumsy, efforts. The man dubbed “The Rostov Ripper” baffled detectives while plucking children and women seemingly from under ivestigator’s noses as they regularly patrolled area train and bus stations. 

Chikatilo began a new job in 1985, again one that included frequent travel, and resumed his killing in 1987. A short jail term stemming from theft charges at his former employment appears to have scared him straight for roughly two years until he murdered a thirteen-year-old boy in Revda during May. The sex-killer was soon taking victims at his previous pace and due to the fact that his travels stretched much farther than before the links between them went fairly unnoticed for a time and police were slower to piece things together. Meanwhile Chikatilo killed nine times in 1988, with many of the victims missing body parts such as nipples, genitals, and tongues. 

Finally on November 20, 1990, Chikatilo was arrested after detectives investigated a recent police report that he had been found at the Leskhov bus station with spots of blood on his face the same day that Svetlana Korostik, 22, had been mutilated, beaten, and stabbed to death in a wooded area nearby. Chikatilo refused to admit his guilt until the 29th of the month when he broke and admitted to 53 slayings. His confessions were unneringly accurate in detail and in the months following he travelled the country with police, pointing out places he had killed and locating bodies and dumpsites. He even went so far as to demonstrate his attacks using a dummy. 

Investigators soon realized that Chikatilo should have been stopped much sooner. After his very first killing he was under suspicion after blood was found on the steps of a small shack located on his property near the scene of Zakotnova’s abduction. Another man was instead found guilty and put to death for the murder. At another time Chikatilo had been subjected to blood tests which cleared him of involvement. Russian forensic scientists unbelievably did not know that in rare cases, blood and semen samples from the same person will turn out differently when tested, making it appear as if they came from two different people. Chikatilo was lucky enough to be one of those people and when his tests came back negative he was dropped as a suspect. At about this same time several retarded men were arrested for the crimes and confessed only to be later released after the murders continued during their confinement. The damage was done, however, as brutal interrogations killed one of the acused and another committed suicide in jail. To add to the ineptitude, one police detective had even been reprimanded and demoted for continuing to be convinced of Chikatilo’s guilt in the serial slayings. 

The trial began on April 14, 1992. The Russian monster was locked inside a steel cage while in court, which actually could have benefitted the accused killer as he feigned madness by grasping the bars of the cage and plastering the creepiest, most insane looks he could muster up. Chikatilo also frequently erupted during the proceedings with wild statements, including a claim that he was pregnant and the guards had been beating him in order to injure his unborn child. As a result of these outbursts he was often not present as the trial wore on and was found guilty of 52 murders on October 15 despite his desperate tactics. On February 14, 1994 the prolific serial killer was executed with a minimal amount of drama when an executioner fired a single bullet into the back of his head.

Background

He was born in 1934 to a 16-year-old mother who was a troublemaker. She left him with his aunt or grandmother most of the time. She was arrested on armed robbery charges and sent to a penitentiary, leaving Manson to live with his aunt and uncle. Even after she was released, his mother didn’t want the responsibility of looking after him. She was even willing to trade him for a drink. His father was never in the scene from his birth.

Manson turned out to be a troublemaker himself, and he was sent to a reform school at the age of nine. By the time he was 26, he was charged with rape, drug charges, stealing, pimping, and more.

He was religious and used this to manipulate people into following him. When he was 34, he formed the “Charles Manson Family” by attracting a group of followers — mostly young women with troubled pasts. He used amphetamines to alter their personalities and they started calling him “Jesus Christ” and did everything he wanted, including physical favors.

He was a music lover who believed that the “Beatles’” were prophets sent to earth to warn of an upcoming revolution. Manson focused on an Armageddon, where the blacks would rise to power and kill all whites and the Manson family would be the only white family living. He felt the blacks wouldn’t be able to stay in power because of an inferiority complex and that the Manson family would then rule the world.

When this did not happen, he started having people killed by his “family” members.

Killings and Sentence

His first murder was that of Sharon Tate, wife of director Roman Polanski. The next was the LaBianca family. He was sentenced to death but later reduced to life imprisonment, when California Supreme Court eliminated death penalties temporarily. He is currently an inmate at Corcoran State Prison.