Top 6 Evil Serial Killers
These are not just the standard notorious serial killers;
these are some of the most horrific killers to have been found guilty of
their crimes. They are on this list either because of the nature of
their crime, or the sheer number of their killings. In no particular
order:
1. Gilles de Rais, Born 1404 [
Crimelibrary]
Gilles de Rais (a French nobleman) is considered to be the precursor
to the modern serial killer. Before he began his killing spree, he rode
as a military captain in the army lead by St Joan of Arc – though it is
unlikely that she knew him. He was accused and ultimately convicted of
torturing, raping and murdering dozens, if not hundreds, of young
children, mainly boys.
According to surviving accounts, Rais
lured children, mainly young boys who were blond haired and blue eyed
(as he had been as a child), to his residences, and raped, tortured and
mutilated them, often ejaculating, perhaps via masturbation, over the
dying victim. He and his accomplices would then set up the severed heads
of the children in order to judge which was the most fair. The precise
number of Rais’s victims is not known, as most of the bodies were burned
or buried. The number of murders is generally placed between 80 and
200; a few have conjectured numbers upwards of 600. The victims ranged
in age from six to eighteen and included both sexes. Although Rais
preferred boys, he would make do with young girls if circumstances
required.
At the transcript of the trial, one of Gilles servants Henriet (an
accomplice to his crimes) described the actions of his master, which
were essentially:
Henriet soon began to collect children for his master,
and was present whilst he massacred them. They were murdered invariably
in one room at Machecoul. The marshal used to bathe in their blood; he
was fond of making Gilles do Sillé, Pontou, or Henriet torture them, and
he experienced intense pleasure in seeing them in their agonies. But
his great passion was to welter in their blood. His servants would stab a
child in the jugular vein, and let the blood squirt over him. The room
was often steeped in blood. When the horrible deed was done, and the
child was dead, the marshal would be filled with grief for what he had
done, and would toss weeping and praying on a bed, or recite fervent
prayers and litanies on his knees, whilst his servants washed the floor,
and burned in the huge fireplace the bodies of the murdered children.
With the bodies were burned the clothes and everything that had belonged
to the little victims. An insupportable odour filled the room, but the
Maréchal do Retz inhaled it with delight
2. Richard Trenton Chase, Born 1950 [
Crimelibrary]
Richard Trenton Chase (May 23, 1950 – December 26, 1980) was an
American serial killer who killed six people in the span of a month in
California. He earned the nickname The Vampire of Sacramento due to his
drinking of his victims’ blood and his cannibalism. He did this as part
of a delusion that he needed to prevent Nazis from turning his blood
into powder via poison they had planted beneath his soap dish.
On December 29, 1977, Chase killed his first victim in a drive-by
shooting, Ambrose Griffin, a 51-year-old engineer and father of two.
Chase’s next victim was Teresa Wallin. Three months pregnant, Teresa was
surprised at her home by Chase, who shot her three times, killing her.
He then had sex with the corpse and mutilated it, bathing in the dead
woman’s blood. On January 27, Chase committed his final murders.
Entering the home of 38-year-old Evelyn Miroth, he encountered her
neighbor, Don Meredith, who he shot with the same .22 handgun. Stealing
Meredith’s wallet and car keys, he rampaged through the house, fatally
shooting Evelyn Miroth, her 6-year-old son Jason, and Miroth’s
22-month-old nephew, David. As with Teresa Wallin, Chase engaged in
necrophilia and cannibalism with Miroth’s corpse. Chase returned to his
home, where he drank David’s blood and ate several of the infant’s
internal organs before disposing of the body at a nearby church. A
witness saw him leaving the scene where he left perfect fingerprints and
shoe-prints – leading to his arrest.
On May 8 Chase was found guilty of six counts of first degree murder
and was sentenced to die in the gas chamber. Waiting to die, Chase
became a feared presence in prison; the other inmates (including several
gang members), aware of the graphic and bizarre nature of his crimes,
feared him, and according to prison officials, they often tried to
convince Chase to commit suicide. On December 26, 1980, a guard doing
cell checks found Chase lying awkwardly on his bed, not breathing. An
autopsy determined that he committed suicide with an overdose of prison
doctor-prescribed antidepressants that he had been saving up over the
last few weeks.
3. Jeffrey Dahmer, Born 1960 [
Crimelibrary]
Dahmer murdered at least 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, with
the majority of the murders occurring between 1989 and 1991. His murders
were particularly gruesome, involving acts of forced sodomy,
necrophilia, dismemberment, and cannibalism. Dahmer committed his first
murder when he was 18, killing Steven Hicks, a 19 year-old hitchhiker.
Dahmer invited Hicks to his house, and killed him because he “didn’t
want him to leave.”
On September 25, 1988, he was arrested for sexually fondling a
13-year-old Laotian boy in Milwaukee, for which he served 10 months of a
one year sentence in a work release camp. However, in 1988 there was
not yet a law requiring offenders to register when convicted of a sex
crime against a minor. He convinced the judge that he needed therapy,
and he was released with a five-year probation on good behavior. Shortly
thereafter, he began a string of murders that would end with his arrest
in 1991.
In the early morning hours of May 27, 1991, 14-year-old Milwaukee
Laotian Konerak Sinthasomphone (the younger brother of the boy Dahmer
had molested) was discovered on the street, wandering nude. Reports of
the boy’s injuries varied. Dahmer told police that they had an argument
while drinking, and that Sinthasomphone was his 19 year-old lover.
Against the teenager’s protests, police turned him over to Dahmer. They
had no suspicions, but reported smelling a strange scent. That scent was
later found to be bodies in the back of his room. Later that night
Dahmer killed and dismembered Sinthasomphone, keeping his skull as a
souvenir. By the summer of 1991, Dahmer was murdering approximately one
person each week.
On July 22, 1991, Dahmer lured another man, Tracy (Traci) Edwards,
into his home. According to the would-be victim, Dahmer struggled with
Edwards in order to handcuff him. Edwards escaped and alerted a police
car, with the handcuffs still hanging from one hand. Edwards led police
back to Dahmer’s apartment. The story of Dahmer’s arrest and the
gruesome inventory in his apartment quickly gained notoriety: several
corpses were stored in acid-filled vats, severed heads were found in his
refrigerator, and implements for the construction of an altar of
candles and human skulls were found in his closet. Accusations soon
surfaced that Dahmer had practiced necrophilia, cannibalism, and
possibly a form of trepanation in order to create so-called “zombies.”
The court found Dahmer guilty on 15 counts of murder and sentenced
him to 15 life terms, totalling 937 years in prison. At his sentencing
hearing, Dahmer expressed remorse for his actions, also saying that he
wished for his own death. On November 28, 1994, Dahmer and another
inmate named Jesse Anderson were beaten to death by fellow inmate
Christopher Scarver while on work detail in the prison gym. Dahmer died
from severe head trauma in the ambulance en route to the hospital.
4. Albert Fish, Born 1870 [
Crimelibrary]
Albert Fish, also known as the Gray Man, the Werewolf of Wysteria and
possibly the Brooklyn Vampire, boasted that he molested over 100
children, and was a suspect in at least five killings. Fish confessed to
three murders that police were able to trace to a known homicide, and
confessed to stabbing at least two other people. He was put on trial for
the murder of Grace Budd, and was convicted and executed.
Fish was visited in prison by the mother of his victim Billy Gaffney to get more details about the death of her son. Fish said:
[I c]ut one of my belts in half, slit these halves in six
strips about 8 inches long. I whipped his bare behind till the blood
ran from his legs. I cut off his ears, nose, slit his mouth from ear to
ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his
belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood. I picked up
four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut him up. I
had a grip with me. I put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly
in the grip. Then I cut him through the middle of his body. Just below
the belly button. Then through his legs about 2 inches below his behind.
I put this in my grip with a lot of paper. I cut off the head, feet,
arms, hands and the legs below the knee.
In addition to this horrifying description, Fish confessed to eating parts of Billy:
I made a stew out of his ears, nose, pieces of his face
and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It
was good. Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey
and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek
of his behind and put them in the oven. Then I picked 4 onions and when
the meat had roasted about 1/4 hour, I poured about a pint of water
over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted
his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy. In
about 2 hours, it was nice and brown, cooked through. I never ate any
roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind
did.
At his trial, several psychiatrists testified about Fish’s sexual
fetishes, including coprophilia, urophilia, pedophilia and masochism.
X-rays of Fish’s pelvis show needles which he inserted in to his skin
for sexual pleasure.
5. Andrei Chikatilo, Born 1936 [
Crimelibrary]
Andrei Chikatilo was a Ukrainian serial killer, nicknamed the Butcher
of Rostov and ‘The Red Ripper.’ He was convicted of the murder of 53
women and children between 1978 and 1990. In 1978, Chikatilo moved to
Shakhty, a small coal mining town near Rostov, where he committed his
first documented murder. On December 22, he lured a nine-year-old girl
to an old house which he bought in secret from his family and attempted
to rape her. When the girl struggled, he stabbed her to death. He
ejaculated in the process of knifing the child, and from then on he was
only able to achieve sexual arousal and orgasm through stabbing and
slashing women and children to death. Despite evidence linking Chikatilo
to the girl’s death, a young man, Alexsandr Kravchenko, was arrested
and later tried and executed for the crime.
He established a pattern of approaching runaways and young vagrants
at bus or railway stations and enticing them to leave. A quick trip into
a nearby forest was the scene for the victim’s death. In 1983, he did
not kill until June, but then he murdered four victims before September.
The victims were all women and children. The adult females were often
prostitutes or homeless tramps who could be lured with promises of
alcohol or money. Chikatilo would usually attempt intercourse with these
victims, but would usually be unable to get an erection, which would
send him into a murderous fury. The child victims were of both sexes,
and Chikatilo would lure them away with his friendly, talkative manner
by promising them toys or candy. In the USSR at the time, reports of
crimes like child rape and serial murder were often suppressed by the
state-controlled media, as such crimes were regarded as being common
only in “hedonistic capitalist nations.”
In 1988 Chikatilo resumed killing, generally keeping his activities
far from the Rostov area. He murdered a woman in Krasny-Sulin in April
and went on to kill another eight people that year, including two
victims in Shakhty. Again there was a long lapse before Chikatilo
resumed killing, murdering seven boys and two women between January and
November of 1990. He was finally caught when trying to approach young
children whilst under police surveillance. He went to trial on April
14, 1992. Despite his odd and disruptive behavior in court, he was
judged fit to stand trial. During the trial he was famously kept in a
cage in the center of the courtroom; it was constructed for his own
protection from the relatives of the deceased. The trial had a very
disturbing atmosphere. The relatives kept shouting threats and insults
to Chikatilo, demanding the authorities to release him so that they
could execute him on their own. He was found guilty of 52 of the 53
murders and sentenced to death for each offense.
He was executed by firing squad (shot in the back of the head) on
February 14, 1994 after Russian president Boris Yeltsin refused a last
ditch appeal by Chikatilo for clemency.
6. Joachim Kroll, Born 1933 [
Crimelibrary]
Kroll was a German serial killer and cannibal. He was known as the
Ruhr Cannibal (Ruhrkannibale), and the Duisburg Man-Eater (Duisburger
Menschenfresser). He was convicted of eight murders but confessed to a
total of 13.
On July 3, 1976, Kroll was arrested for kidnapping and killing a
four-year-old girl named Marion Ketter. As police went from home to
home, a neighbor approached a policeman and told him that the waste-pipe
in his apartment building had blocked up, and when he had asked his
neighbor, Kroll, whether he knew what had been blocking the pipe, Kroll
had simply replied; “Guts”. Upon this report, the police went up to
Kroll’s apartment and found the body of the Ketter girl cut up: some
parts were in the fridge, a hand was cooking in a pan of boiling water
and the intestines were found stuck in the waste-pipe.
Kroll said that he often sliced portions of flesh from his victims to
cook and eat them, claiming that he did this to save on his grocery
bills. In custody, he believed that he was going to get a simple
operation to cure him of his homicidal urges and would then be released
from prison. Instead he was charged with eight murders and one attempted
murder. In April 1982, after a 151-day trial, he was convicted on all
counts and was given nine life sentences. He died of a heart attack in
1991 in the prison of Rheinbach, near Bonn.
