Serial killer

A serial killer is typically a person who murders three or more people, with the killings taking place over more than a month and including a cooling off period between them.

While most authorities, set a threshold of three murders when designating serial killers, the FBI  defines serial killing as "a series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually, but not always, by one offender acting alone".

One of the earliest known serial killers was Liu Pengli, a Chinese prince from mid-100 BC. He would go on expeditions with others, murdering people for sheer sport. He had over 100 confirmed victims. When he was uncovered, his uncle the emperor banished him instead of executing him.

French knight Gilles de Rais (c. September 1405 – October 26, 1440) was one of the earliest known serial killers, having engaged in a series of child murders, with victims possibly numbering in the hundreds. In his confession, Gilles mentioned the first assaults on children occurred between spring 1432 and spring 1433. The killings came to an end in 1440, when he was taken into custody upon an accusation brought against him by the Bishop of Nantes. At his trial, Gilles was condemned to death and hanged at Nantes.

Hungarian noblewoman Countess Elizabeth Báthory (August 7, 1560 – August 21, 1614) was the most prolific female serial killer of all time. She tortured and killed over 650 people, believing the blood of young girls would maintain her youth. For a long time, she was protected by her high social status.

Copy of the lost 1585 original portrait of Elizabeth Báthory

The Bloody Benders, consisting of John Bender, his wife, Elvira Bender, son, John, Jr. and daughter, Kate were America’s first serial killer family. They are known to have killed 11 travelers between 1871 and 1873, luring each of them into their cabin in Cherryvale, Kansas. They disappeared before their crimes were discovered and were never seen again.

Herman Webster Mudgett, more commonly known as H. H. Holmes, was the first recognized serial killer in United States history.  Holmes built a whole hotel with secret rooms for murder and torture purposes, where more than 200 victims could have been  killed.

While Holmes confessed to 27 murders, only nine could be plausibly confirmed. Holmes, who sold the skeletons of his victims to medical science, was hanged at Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896.

H. H. Holmes

Marcel Petiot was a French doctor, who was convicted of multiple murders after the discovery of the remains of 23 people in the basement of his home in Paris during World War II.

After his crimes were discovered, Marcel Petiot grew a beard and joined the police using the alias Captain Valeri. "Valeri" was assigned to find Petiot until someone recognized him, months later. On May 25, 1946, Petiot was beheaded, after a stay of a few days due to a problem in the release mechanism of the guillotine.

Petoit is suspected of the murder of around 60 victims during his lifetime, although the true number remains unknown.

Serial killer Carroll Cole was responsible for the deaths of at least 15 women and one boybetween 1947 and 1980. He killed his first victim at just 8 years of age, drowning a classmate in a lake. The death was thought to have been an accident until he confessed to it in an autobiography he wrote in prison. Cole was executed by lethal injection at Nevada State Prison on December 6, 1985. 

The crimes of murderer and bodysnatcher Edward Gein (August 27, 1906 – July 26, 1984), committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety after authorities discovered that he had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin. The movie characters Norman Bates (Psycho), Leatherface (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs) were all based on Gein.

Ed Gein

Albert DeSalvo, known as the ‘Boston Strangler’, was jailed for life for sexual assault and armed robbery on January 18, 1967. He admitted murdering 13 women between 1962 and 1964, but was not charged due to a lack of evidence. DaSalvo was stabbed to death in prison in 1973. DNA testing later proved "with an unprecedented level of certainty" that he was behind the murder of the final victim, Mary Sullivan.

Mack Ray Edwards was a serial killer who worked for CalTrans. He’d kill his victims and then bury the bodies in places he would later help build highways over. In 1970 Edwards was caught and he confessed killed three children from 1953 to 1956, and three more in 1968 and 1969.  Not all his victims have been found, and many are very likely still under some of the California highways.

Ted Bundy (November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was a law student who is believed to have killed at least 36 females, both adults and children, during the 1970s. The year the murders began, Bundy was the assistant director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission and during this period he wrote a pamphlet for women on rape prevention. Convicted in 1979 on several charges, including the murder of a 12-year-old girl, Bundy was sentenced to death. He was executed in Florida in 1989 after a string of unsuccessful appeals.

Ted Bundy

Serial killer Rodney Alcala (b August 23, 1943) is believed to have murdered up to 130 people. In the midst of his three-year killing spree in California between 1977 and 1979, Alcala was featured a contestant on The Dating Game, and was picked by the bachelorette. She never followed up on the date because she found him "creepy".

Peter Sutcliffe, also known as the Yorkshire Ripper, was sentenced to life imprisonment on May 22, 1981, having been found guilty of 13 counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder. He was convicted of murdering 13 women and attempting to murder seven others between 1975 and 1980. His victims were all women, mostly prostitutes, who he attacked with a hammer and a knife. Sutcliffe claimed that he was on a mission from God to kill prostitutes, and he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He was initially sentenced to 20 concurrent sentences of life imprisonment, but these were later converted to a whole life order,

Between 1974 and 1991, Dennis Lynn Rader, known as the BTK Killer or the BTK Strangler killed ten people in Sedgwick County, Kansas. ("BTK" stands for "Bind, Torture, Kill"). In 2004, Rader had sent a letter to the police on a floppy disk that was used to communicate with them. The authorities traced the metadata on the diskette to a computer at the Christ Lutheran Church in Park City, Kansas. This information, along with other clues from Rader's communications, eventually led to his arrest on February 16, 2005.

Joseph Christopher (July 26, 1955 – March 1, 1993) was an American serial killer who gained infamy for a series of murders in the early 1980s. He is believed to have killed at least twelve individuals and wounded numerous others. Christopher had tried to check himself into a psychiatric center just weeks before he began his murders. He died in prison from a rare form of male breast at the age of 37,

Aileen Wuornos was the first female serial killer in America. In 1992 she was charged with the shooting of five middle-aged men she met on highways by hitch hiking. Wuornos confessed to shooting seven men in self-defence and was eventually executed on October 9, 2002.

Aileen Wuornos

A nurse by profession, Beverly Allitt was convicted in 1993 of the murder of four children in her care and of the attempted murder of three others. Dubbed the UK's first female serial killer, she allegedly suffered from a medical condition termed 'Münchhausen's syndrome by proxy'.

Pakistani serial killer Javed Iqbal (1956 – October 8, 2001), was sentenced to death by being strangled in front of his victims' families, dismembered and then burned in a vat of acid, in the same way he killed over 100 teenage boys. He was found dead in his cell before the execution could be carried out.

British doctor Harold Shipman (AKA 'Doctor Death') was proven to have murdered at least 250 of his patients, but may have killed as many as 459 people, making one of the most prolific serial killers in recorded human history. Shipman died on January 13, 2004, one day prior to his 58th birthday, by hanging himself in his cell at Wakefield Prison.

The world's deadliest serial killer, Luis Cubillos, also known as La Bestia ("The Beast") (born January 25, 1957) admitted to the rape, torture and murder of 147 young boys in Colombia in 1999 and was sentenced to 835 years in prison. He is suspected to have murdered many more.

 Luis Cubillos by Government of Colombia

76% of all known serial killers in the 20th century were from the United States.

 Serial Killers are more likely to have suffered a head injury as a child than non-serial killers.

Less than one percent of murders in any given year are committed by serial killers.