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Research on Serial Killers

UK serial Killers –

Women

Beverley Allitt (Angel of Death) -

Beverley Gail Allitt is an English serial killer who was convicted of murdering four children, attempting to murder three other children, and causing grievous bodily harm to a further six children. The crimes were committed over a period of 59 days between February and April 1991 in the children's ward at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire, where Allitt was employed as a State Enrolled Nurse. She administered large doses of insulin to at least two victims and a large air bubble was found in the body of another, but police were unable to establish how all the attacks were carried out. In May 1993, at Nottingham Crown Court, she received 13 life sentences for the crimes.

Rosemary (Rose) West –

West is known as one of the most famous serial killers in British history. Alongside husband Fred she carried out the torture and murder of 10 young girls between 1971 and 1987. The couple's home in Gloucester was the scene of many of the crimes, and was widely dubbed the 'House of Horrors'. She never confessed to any of the murders but the circumstantial evidence against West was overwhelming. West went on trial in 1995 and was unanimously found guilty of 10 murders, although had no involvement in the first two that her husband committed. In only the second instance in British history, she was sentenced to a full life tariff meaning she would die in prison. Hindley was the first. West remains incarcerated at HMP Low Newton.

Myra Hindley (Moors Murder) –

Hindley and fellow Moors Murderer Ian Brady are two of the most infamous criminals of the 20th century. Convicted of five killings and the subsequent burials Hindley was widely known in the press as the "most evil woman in Britain". Five children - Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans - were killed between 1963 and 1965. The full extent of the pair's killing spree didn't come to light until after their confessions in 1985, some 20 years after their initial trial. Despite making repeated appeals against her life sentence Hindley was never released from prison and she died in incarceration in 2002 aged 60.

Mary Elizabeth Wilson – (Merry Widow of Windy Nook) –

Known as the Merry Widow of Windy Nook, Wilson is the last woman to be sentenced to death in Durham, in 1958. In a startlingly short amount of time, Wilson married and lost four husbands between 1955 and 1957. By this time she had earned herself a reputation for her cheery attitude towards the deaths and her gallows humour. She apparently joked at her latest wedding reception that any left over sandwiches could be used at the funeral, while also asking the local undertaker for a 'trade discount' for providing him with so much business. Wilson was convicted of murdering two of her four husbands, but even though she was handed a death sentence she was given a reprieve due to her advancing years.

Amelia Dyer-

Dyer is known as the most prolific baby farm murderer of Victorian England. While she was only tried for one, it is estimated she could have played a part in the deaths of as many as 400 children. The practice of baby farming saw people act as adopted parents in exchange for a fee. In return for a substantial one-off payment Dyer would take the child, but instead of looking after it she would murder them and pocket the money anyway. In April 1896 she was arrested and charged. In May of that year after only four and half minutes of jury deliberations Dyer was found guilty and sentenced to death.

Mary Ann Britland –

Bolton-born Britland is infamous as the first woman to be executed at Strangeways Prison. Britland poisoned her eldest daughter Elizabeth, her husband Thomas, and the wife of her lover, Mary Dixon in a three-month period in 1886. Despite all three murders being almost identical Britland maintained her innocence until the end declaring in court: "I am quite innocent, I am not guilty at all."

Mary Ann-Cotton-

Cotton was a dressmaker and nurse who has been implicated in as many as 21 murders. Collecting insurance pay outs Cotton is suspected in relation to the deaths of several of her husbands. Newspapers began to look closer into her past when it was discovered she had lost three husbands, a lover, a friend, her mother and a dozen children, all to stomach fevers. After forensic investigations arsenic was found and Cotton was charged and subsequently hanged for her crimes in 1873.

Joanna Dennehy –

The Peterborough ditch murders were a series of serial murders which took place in Cambridgeshire, England, in March 2013. All of the victims were male and died from stab wounds. The bodies of all three men were discovered dumped in ditches outside Peterborough. The perpetrator was Joanna Dennehy, a local woman who was later sentenced to life imprisonment with a whole life order.

Men

Steve Wright –

Steven Gerald James Wright (born 24 April 1958) is an English serial killer, also known as the Suffolk Strangler and the Ipswich Ripper. He is serving life imprisonment for the murder of five women who worked as sex workers in Ipswich, Suffolk. The killings took place during the final months of 2006, and Wright was found guilty in February 2008.

Graham Young-

Graham Frederick Young (7 September 1947 – 1 August 1990) was an English serial killer who used poison to kill his victims. He was sent to Broadmoor Hospital in 1962 after poisoning several members of his family. After his release in 1971 he went on to poison 7 more people, two of whom died. Young, who was known as the Teacup Poisoner later the St. Albans Poisoner, was then sent to Parkhurst Prison where he died of a heart attack in 1990.

Fred West –

Frederick Walter Stephen West (29 September 1941 – 1 January 1995) was an English serial killer who committed at least 12 murders between 1967 and 1987 in Gloucestershire, the majority with his second wife, Rosemary West.

All the victims were young women. At least eight of these murders involved the Wests' sexual gratification and included rape, bondage, torture and mutilation; the victims' dismembered bodies were typically buried in the cellar or garden of the Wests' Cromwell Street home in Gloucester, which became known as the "House of Horrors". Fred also committed at least two murders on his own, and Rose murdered Fred's stepdaughter, Charmaine. The couple were apprehended and charged in 1994.

Fred West fatally asphyxiated himself while on remand at HM Prison Birmingham on 1 January 1995, at which time he and Rose were jointly charged with nine murders, and he with three further murders. In November 1995, Rose was convicted of ten murders and sentenced to ten life terms with a whole life order.

Peter Sutcliffe –

Peter William Coonan (born Peter William Sutcliffe; 2 June 1946) is an English serial killer who was dubbed the "Yorkshire Ripper" by the press. In 1981 Sutcliffe was convicted of murdering 13 women and attempting to murder seven others.

Sutcliffe had allegedly regularly used the services of prostitutes in Leeds and Bradford. When interviewed by authorities, he claimed that the voice of God had sent him on a mission to kill prostitutes. Sutcliffe carried out his murder spree over five years, during which time the public were especially shocked by the murders of women who were not prostitutes. After his arrest for driving with false number plates in January 1981, the police questioned him about the killings and he confessed to being the perpetrator.

At his trial in 1981, Sutcliffe pleaded not guilty to murder on grounds of diminished responsibility after a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia but his defence was rejected by a majority of the jury. He is serving 20 concurrent sentences of life imprisonment. Following his conviction, Sutcliffe began using his mother's maiden name and became known as Peter William Coonan.

West Yorkshire Police were criticised for the time taken in apprehending Sutcliffe despite interviewing him nine times in the course of their investigation. Because of the sensational nature of the case, the police handled an exceptional amount of information, some of it misleading (including a hoax recorded message and letters purporting to be from the "Ripper"). The 1982 Byford Report of the official inquiry (made public in 2006) confirmed the validity of the criticism.

The High Court dismissed an appeal by Sutcliffe in 2010, confirming that he would serve a whole life order and never be released from custody. He was transferred from prison to a high-security psychiatric hospital in March 1984. In August 2016 it was ruled that Sutcliffe was mentally fit to be returned to prison, and was transferred that month to HM Prison Frankland in Durham.

George Joseph Smith-

George Joseph Smith (11 January 1872 – 13 August 1915) was an English serial killer and bigamist. In 1915, he was convicted and subsequently hanged for the slayings of three women, the case becoming known as the Brides in the Bath Murders. As well as being widely reported in the media, the case was significant in the history of forensic pathology and detection. It was also one of the first cases in which similarities between connected crimes were used to prove deliberation, a technique used in subsequent prosecutions.

Harold Shipman-

Harold Frederick Shipman (14 January 1946 – 13 January 2004) was an English general practitioner and one of the most prolific serial killers in history. On 31 January 2000, a jury found Shipman guilty of 15 murders of patients under his care. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with the recommendation that he never be released.

The Shipman Inquiry, a two-year-long investigation of all deaths certified by Shipman, which was chaired by Dame Janet Smith, examined Shipman's crimes. The inquiry identified 218 victims and estimated his total victim count at 250, about 80% of whom were elderly women. His youngest confirmed victim was a 41-year-old man, although "significant suspicion" arose that he had killed patients as young as four.

Much of Britain's legal structure concerning health care and medicine was reviewed and modified as a result of Shipman's crimes. He is the only British doctor to have been found guilty of murdering his patients, although other doctors have been acquitted of similar crimes or convicted on lesser charges.

Shipman died on 13 January 2004, one day prior to his 58th birthday, by hanging himself in his cell at Wakefield Prison.

Stephen Port-

Stephen John Port (born 22 February 1975) is a British convicted serial rapist and serial killer. He is responsible for murdering at least four men and for committing multiple rapes. Port received a life sentence with a whole life order on 25 November 2016, meaning he will not become eligible for parole and is unlikely to ever be released from prison. Police announced they are now investigating at least 58 deaths connected to the use of gamma-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) in response to the Port case.

Dennis Nilsen-

Dennis Andrew Nilsen (23 November 1945 – 12 May 2018) was a Scottish serial killer and necrophile, who murdered at least 12 young men in a series of killings committed between 1978 and 1983 in London, England. Convicted, at the Old Bailey, of six counts of murder and two of attempted murder, Nilsen was sentenced to life imprisonment on 4 November 1983, with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of 25 years. In his later years, he was incarcerated at Full Sutton maximum security prison.

Nilsen committed the murders at two North London addresses. He lured his victims to these through guile and murdered them by strangulation, sometimes accompanied by drowning. Following the murders, Nilsen observed a ritual in which he bathed and dressed the victims' bodies, which he retained for extended periods of time, before dissecting and disposing of the remains by burning on a bonfire, or flushing down a lavatory.

Nilsen became known as the Muswell Hill Murderer as he committed his later murders in the Muswell Hill district of North London. He died in prison on 12 May 2018.

Patrick Mackay-

Patrick David Mackay (born 25 September 1952) is a British serial killer who confessed to murdering 11 people in London and Kent in England, from 1974 to 1975.

Colin Ireland-

Colin Ireland (16 March 1954 – 21 February 2012) was a British serial killer known as the Gay Slayer because his victims were homosexual. Criminologist David Wilson believes that Ireland was a psychopath.

Ireland suffered a severely dysfunctional upbringing. He committed various crimes from the age of 16 and had served time in borstals and prisons. While living in Southend, he started frequenting the Coleherne pub, a gay pub in Earl's Court. Ireland sought men who liked the passive role and sadomasochism, so he could readily restrain them as they initially believed it was a sexual game.

Ireland said he was heterosexual – he had been married twice – and that he pretended to be gay only to befriend potential victims. Ireland claimed that his motives were not sexually motivated. He was highly organised, and carried a full murder kit of rope and handcuffs and a full change of clothes to each murder. After killing his victim he cleaned the flat of any forensic evidence linking him to the scene and stayed in the flat until morning in order to avoid arousing suspicion from leaving in the middle of the night.

He was jailed for life for the murders in December 1993 and remained imprisoned until his death in February 2012, at the age of 57.

Trevor Hardy- Trevor Joseph Hardy (11 June 1945 – 25 September 2012), also known as the Beast of Manchester, was a convicted English serial killer who murdered three teenage girls in the Manchester area between December 1974 and March 1976. In 1977, he was found guilty on three charges of murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment, remaining in prison until his death 35 years later.

John George Haigh-

John George Haigh (/heɪɡ/; 24 July 1909 – 10 August 1949), commonly known as the Acid Bath Murderer, was an English serial killer. He was convicted for the murders of six people, although he claimed to have killed nine. He battered or shot his victims to death and used concentrated sulphuric acid to dispose of their corpses before forging papers so he could sell the victims' possessions and collect substantial sums of money.

Ian Brady -

The Moors murders were carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around Manchester, England. The victims were five children aged between 10 and 17—Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans—at least four of whom were sexually assaulted. Two of the victims were discovered in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor; a third grave was discovered there in 1987, more than twenty years after Brady and Hindley's trial. The body of a fourth victim, Keith Bennett, is also suspected to be buried there, but despite repeated searches it remains undiscovered.

The police were initially aware of only three killings, those of Edward Evans, Lesley Ann Downey and John Kilbride. The investigation was reopened in 1985, after Brady was reported in the press as having confessed to the murders of Pauline Reade and Keith Bennett. Brady and Hindley were taken separately to Saddleworth Moor to assist the police in their search for the graves, both by then having confessed to the additional murders.

Characterised by the press as "the most evil woman in Britain", Hindley made several appeals against her life sentence, claiming she was a reformed woman and no longer a danger to society, but was never released. She died in 2002, aged 60. Brady was declared criminally insane in 1985 and confined in the high-security Ashworth Hospital. He made it clear that he never wished to be released, and repeatedly asked to be allowed to die. He died in 2017, in Ashworth, aged 79.

The murders were the result of what Malcolm MacCulloch, professor of forensic psychiatry at Cardiff University, called a "concatenation of circumstances". The trial judge, Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson, described Brady and Hindley in his closing remarks as "two sadistic killers of the utmost depravity"

US Serial Killers –

Women

Aileen Wuornos –

Between 1989-90, prostitute-turned-killer Aileen Wuornos murdered seven johns who had the misfortune of looking for a little extra-marital action. A minor traffic accident in one her victim's cars led to her arrest and eventual 2002 execution.

Jane Toppan-

Jane Toppan, a nurse with a private practice, racked up dozens of victims between 1885 and her capture near the turn of the century. While in police custody in 1901, she admitted to being aroused by the process of killing and was eventually found to be insane and not guilty of her crimes.

Nannie Doss –

Nannie Doss was a black widow who went through five husbands before being caught and charged with a slew of murders including those of her five husbands, a mother-in-law, her sisters, two of their children, and her own mother.

She was never put to death (because she was a woman) and died in prison at age 59 in 1965.

Genene Jones –

Jones, a former pediatric nurse, killed a number of (one confirmed, could be up to 90) infants and children in her care. She used injections of several drugs to cause the kids to get gravely ill, and she'd save them to gain praise.

Men

Andrew Cunanan-

Andrew Phillip Cunanan (August 31 1969 – July 23, 1997) was an American serial killer who murdered at least five people, including Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace and Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin, during a three-month period in mid-1997. Cunanan's string of murders ended on July 23 of that year with his suicide by firearm.

In his final years, Cunanan lived in the greater San Diego area without a job. He befriended wealthy older men and spent their money. To impress acquaintances in the local gay community he boasted about social events at clubs and often paid the check at restaurants. One millionaire friend had broken up with Cunanan in 1996, the prior year.

Darren Criss – The Assassination of Gianni Versace

David Parker Ray (The Toy Box Killer)-

David Parker Ray (November 6, 1939 – May 28, 2002), also known as the Toy-Box Killer, was a suspected American serial killer, and known torturer of women. Though no bodies were found, he was accused by his accomplices of killing several people and suspected by police to have murdered as many as 60 people from Arizona and New Mexico, while living in Elephant Butte, New Mexico, approximately 7 miles north of Truth or Consequences. He soundproofed a truck trailer that he called his "toy box", and equipped it with items used for sexual torture. Ray was convicted of kidnapping and torture in 2001, for which he received a lengthy sentence, but he was never convicted of murder. He died of a heart attack about one year after his convictions in two cases (the second of which resulted in a plea deal).

http://thinkingaboutphilosophy.blogspot.com/2012/10/david-parker-rays-audio-tape-transcript.html - Tape Transcript

David Berkowitz (Son Of Sam) –

David Richard Berkowitz (born Richard David Falco, June 1, 1953), known also as the Son of Sam and the .44 Caliber Killer, is an American serial killer who pleaded guilty to eight separate shooting attacks that began in New York City during the summer of 1976. The crimes were perpetrated with a .44 caliber Bulldog revolver. He killed six people and wounded seven others by July 1977. As the number of victims increased, Berkowitz eluded the biggest police manhunt in the history of New York City while leaving letters that mocked the police and promised further crimes, which were highly publicized by the press. The killing spree terrorized New Yorkers and achieved worldwide notoriety.

On the night of August 10, 1977, Berkowitz was taken into custody by New York City police homicide detectives in front of his Yonkers apartment building, and he was subsequently indicted for eight shooting incidents. He confessed to all of them, and initially claimed to have been obeying the orders of a demon manifested in the form of a dog named "Harvey" which belonged to his neighbor "Sam". Despite his explanation, Berkowitz was found mentally competent to stand trial. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was incarcerated in state prison. He subsequently admitted that the dog-and-devil story was a hoax. In the course of further police investigations, Berkowitz was also implicated in many unsolved arsons in the city.

Intense coverage of the case by the media lent a kind of celebrity status to Berkowitz, and some observers noted that he seemed to enjoy it. In response, the New York State legislature enacted new legal statutes known popularly as "Son of Sam laws", designed to keep criminals from profiting financially from the publicity created by their crimes. The statutes have remained law in New York in spite of various legal challenges, and similar laws have been enacted in several other states.

Berkowitz has been incarcerated since his arrest and is serving six consecutive life sentences. During the mid-1990s, he amended his confession to claim that he had been a member of a violent Satanic cult which orchestrated the incidents as ritual murder. He remains the only person ever charged with the shootings, although some law enforcement authorities have questioned whether his claims are credible. A new investigation of the murders began in 1996 but was suspended indefinitely after inconclusive findings.

Edmund Kemper (Co-Ed Killer) –

Edmund Emil Kemper III (born December 18, 1948) is an American serial killer and necrophile who murdered ten people, including his paternal grandparents and mother. He is noted for his large size, at 6 feet 9 inches (2.06 m), and for his high IQ, at 145. Kemper was nicknamed the "Co-ed Killer" as most of his victims were students at co-educational institutions.

Born in California, Kemper had a disturbed childhood. He moved to Montana with his abusive mother at a young age before returning to California, where he murdered his paternal grandparents when he was 15. He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by court psychiatrists and sentenced to the Atascadero State Hospital as a criminally insane juvenile.

Released at the age of 21 after convincing psychiatrists he was rehabilitated, Kemper was regarded as non-threatening by his victims. He targeted young female hitchhikers during his killing spree, luring them into his vehicle and driving them to secluded areas where he would murder them before taking their corpses back to his home to be decapitated, dismembered and violated. Kemper then murdered his mother and one of her friends before turning himself in to the authorities.

Found sane and guilty at his trial in 1973, he requested the death penalty for his crimes. However, capital punishment was suspended in California at the time, and he instead received eight life sentences. Since then, Kemper has been incarcerated in the California Medical Facility. He has waived his right to a parole hearing several times and has said he is "happy" in prison.

The Zodiac Killer –

The Zodiac Killer or Zodiac is the pseudonym of an unidentified serial killer who operated in Northern California from at least the late 1960s to the 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.

Suspects have been named by law enforcement and amateur investigators, but no conclusive evidence has surfaced. The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) marked the case "inactive" in April 2004, but re-opened it at some point prior to March 2007. The case also remains open in the city of Vallejo, as well as in Napa County and Solano County. The California Department of Justice has maintained an open case file on the Zodiac murders since 1969.

Jeffrey Dahmer –

Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer (/ˈdɑːmər/; May 21, 1960 – November 28, 1994), also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal or the Milwaukee Monster, was an American serial killer and sex offender, who committed the rape, murder, and dismemberment of 17 men and boys from 1978 to 1991. Many of his later murders involved necrophilia, cannibalism, and the permanent preservation of body parts—typically all or part of the skeleton.

Although diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, and a psychotic disorder, Dahmer was found to be legally sane at his trial. Convicted of 15 of the 16 murders he had committed in Wisconsin, Dahmer was sentenced to 15 terms of life imprisonment on February 15, 1992. He was later sentenced to a 16th term of life imprisonment for an additional homicide committed in Ohio in 1978.

On November 28, 1994, Dahmer was beaten to death by Christopher Scarver, a fellow inmate at the Columbia Correctional Institution.

Dennis Rader - BTK –

Dennis Lynn Rader (born March 9, 1945) is an American serial killer known as BTK or the BTK Strangler. He gave himself the name "BTK" (for "Bind, Torture, Kill"), which was his infamous signature. Between 1974 and 1991, Rader killed ten people in the Wichita, Kansas, metro area.

Rader was particularly known for sending taunting letters to police and newspapers describing the details of his crimes. After a decade-long hiatus, Rader resumed sending letters in 2004, leading to his 2005 arrest and subsequent guilty plea. He is serving ten consecutive life sentences at El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas.

John Wayne Gacy-

John Wayne Gacy Jr. (March 17, 1942 – May 10, 1994) was an American serial killer and rapist. He sexually assaulted, tortured and murdered at least 33 teenage boys and young men between 1972 and 1978 in Cook County, Illinois (a part of metropolitan Chicago).

All of Gacy's known murders were committed inside his Norwood Park ranch house. His victims were typically induced to his address by force or deception, and all but one of his victims were murdered by either asphyxiation or strangulation with a makeshift tourniquet; his first victim was stabbed to death. Gacy buried 26 of his victims in the crawl space of his home. Three other victims were buried elsewhere on his property, while the bodies of his last four known victims were discarded in the Des Plaines River.

Convicted of 33 murders, Gacy was sentenced to death on March 13, 1980, for 12 of those killings. He spent 14 years on death row before he was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994.

Gacy became known as the "Killer Clown" because of his charitable services at fund-raising events, parades, and children's parties where he would dress as "Pogo the Clown" or "Patches the Clown", characters he had devised.

Ted Bundy-

Theodore Robert Bundy (born Theodore Robert Cowell; November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was an American serial killer, kidnapper, rapist, burglar, 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 to 30 homicides that he committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978. The true number of victims is unknown and possibly higher.

Many of Bundy's young female victims regarded him as handsome and charismatic, which were traits that he exploited to win their trust. He would typically approach them in public places, feigning injury or disability, or impersonating an authority figure, before overpowering and assaulting them in secluded locations. He sometimes revisited his secondary crime scenes, grooming and performing sexual acts with the decomposing corpses until putrefaction and destruction by wild animals made further interaction impossible. He decapitated at least 12 victims and kept some of the severed heads as mementos in his apartment. On a few occasions, he broke into dwellings at night and bludgeoned his victims as they slept.

In 1975, Bundy was jailed for the first time when he was incarcerated in Utah for aggravated kidnapping and attempted criminal assault. He then became a suspect in a progressively longer list of unsolved homicides in multiple states. Facing murder charges in Colorado, he engineered two dramatic escapes and committed further assaults, including three murders, before his ultimate recapture in Florida in 1978. For the Florida homicides, he received three death sentences in two separate trials.

Bundy was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on January 24, 1989. Biographer Ann Rule described Bundy as "a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another human's pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death, and even after". He once called himself "the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet". Attorney Polly Nelson, a member of his last defense team, wrote he was "the very definition of heartless evil".

Ed Gein-

Edward Theodore Gein (/ɡiːn/; August 27, 1906[5] – July 26, 1984), also known as The Butcher of Plainfield, was an American murderer and body snatcher. His crimes, committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety after authorities discovered that 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 in 1954, and a Plainfield hardware store owner, Bernice Worden, in 1957. Gein was initially found unfit to stand trial and confined to a mental health facility. In 1968, Gein was found guilty but legally insane of the murder of Worden, and was remanded to a psychiatric institution. He died at Mendota Mental Health Institute of cancer-induced liver and respiratory failure at age 77 on July 26, 1984. He is buried next to his family in the Plainfield Cemetery, in a now-unmarked grave.

Albert Fish –

Hamilton Howard "Albert" Fish (May 19, 1870 – January 16, 1936) was an American serial killer, child rapist and cannibal. He was also known as the Gray Man, the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire, the Moon Maniac, and The Boogey Man. Fish once boasted that he "had children in every state", and at one time stated his number of victims was about 100. However, it is not known whether he was referring to rapes or cannibalization, nor is it known if the statement was truthful. He was a suspect in at least five murders during his lifetime. Fish confessed to three murders that police were able to trace to a known homicide, and he confessed to stabbing at least two other people. He was put on trial for the kidnapping and murder of Grace Budd, and was convicted and executed by electric chair. His crimes were dramatized in the 2007 film The Gray Man, starring Patrick Bauchau as Fish

Richard Ramerez (The Night Stalker) –

Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramírez, known as Richard Ramirez (/rəˈmiːrɛz/; 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. The judge who upheld his thirteen death sentences remarked that Ramirez's deeds exhibited "cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding". Ramirez died of complications from B-cell lymphoma while awaiting execution on California's death row.

H. H. Holmes –

Herman Webster Mudgett (May 16, 1861 – May 7, 1896), better known as Dr. Henry Howard Holmes or more commonly known as H. H. Holmes, was an American serial killer. While he confessed to 27 murders, only nine could be plausibly confirmed and several of the people he claimed to have murdered were still alive. He is said to have killed as many as 200, though this figure is only traceable to 1940s pulp magazines. Many victims were said to have been killed in a mixed-use building which he owned, located about 3 miles (5 km) west of the 1893 World's Fair: Columbian Exposition, supposedly called the World's Fair Hotel (informally called "The Murder Hotel"), though evidence suggests the hotel portion was never truly open for business.

Besides being a serial killer, Holmes was also a con artist and a bigamist, the subject of more than 50 lawsuits in Chicago alone. Many now-common stories of his crimes sprang from fictional accounts that later authors assumed to be factual. In a 2017 biography, Adam Selzer wrote that Holmes' story is "effectively a new American tall tale – and, like all the best tall tales, it sprang from a kernel of truth".

H. H. Holmes was executed on May 7, 1896, nine days before his 35th birthday, for the murder of his friend and accomplice Benjamin Pitezel. During his trial for the murder of Pitezel, Holmes confessed to many other killings.

Gary Ridgeway (Green River Killer) –

Gary Leon Ridgway (born February 18, 1949), also known as the Green River Killer, is an American serial killer. He was initially convicted of 48 separate murders. As part of his plea bargain, another conviction was added, bringing the total number of convictions to 49, making him the most prolific serial killer in United States history according to confirmed murders. He killed myriad teenage girls and women in the state of Washington during the 1980s and 1990s.

Most of Ridgway's victims were alleged to be sex workers and other women in vulnerable circumstances, including underage runaways. The press gave him his nickname after the first five victims were found in the Green River before his identity was known. He strangled his victims, usually by hand but sometimes using ligatures. After strangling them, he would dump their bodies in forested and overgrown areas in King County, often returning to the bodies to have sexual intercourse with them.

On November 30, 2001, as Ridgway was leaving the Kenworth truck factory where he worked in Renton, Washington, he was arrested for the murders of four women whose cases were linked to him through DNA evidence. As part of a plea bargain wherein he agreed to disclose the locations of still-missing women, he was spared the death penalty and received a sentence of life imprisonment without parole.

Angelo Buono, Jr. & Kenneth Bianchi (Hill Side Stranglers)-

he Hillside Strangler, later the Hillside Stranglers, is the media epithet for one, later two American serial killers who terrorized Los Angeles between October 1977 and February 1978, with the nicknames originating from the fact that many of the victims' bodies were discovered in the hills surrounding greater Los Angeles. The police, however, knew because of the positions of the bodies that two individuals were killing together, but withheld this information from the press. These two individuals were discovered to be cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, who were later convicted of kidnapping, raping, torturing, and murdering 10 women and girls ranging in age from 12 to 28 years old.

The Hillside Strangler murders began with the deaths of three sex workers who were found strangled and dumped naked on hillsides northeast of Los Angeles between October and early November 1977, but it was not until the deaths of five young women who were not sex workers, but girls who had been abducted from middle-class neighborhoods, that the media attention and subsequent "Hillside Strangler" moniker came to be. There were two more deaths in December and February before the murders abruptly stopped, an extensive investigation proved fruitless until the arrest of Bianchi in January 1979 for the murder of two more young women in Washington State and the subsequent linking of his past to the Strangler case. The most expensive trial in the history of the California legal system at that time followed, with Bianchi and Buono eventually being found guilty of these crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment.

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