The term ‘serial killer’ was coined by former FBI Special Agent Robert Ressler in the 1970s. Broadly speaking, a serial killer is defined as a killer (or killers working together) who kill two or more people over a period longer than a month. The features often common to such killings, as profiled by the FBI, include sexual motives, anger, thrill, financial gain and attention seeking. Although a number of the cases included here pre-date the common use of the term ‘serial killer’, the features of the following cases are all clear exemplars of serial killers.
During the autumn of 1888 a series of horrific murders committed in the East End of London were to disturb the nation, made all the more grimly fascinating because the murderer was never caught, though his sobriquet lives on in infamy – Jack the Ripper. The press in 1888, along with urban myth and subsequent authors, have ascribed numerous murders to this killer, but just five deaths are widely agreed upon by most crime historians and Ripperologists as being committed by Jack the Ripper.
The first murder was that of Mary Ann ‘Polly’ Nichols, aged forty-two, whose body was discovered in the early hours of 31 August 1888 on Buck’s Row, Whitechapel. This horrific and apparently motiveless murder provoked concerns that an insane killer could well be walking abroad in the East End of London. Other, earlier knife attacks and murders were soon ascribed, mostly by the press, to the person they were now calling the ‘Whitechapel Fiend’, or ‘Leather Apron’ because at the time it was believed by many that the killer was a slaughterman. Inspector Frederick Abberline and his team were despatched from Scotland Yard to investigate the murder ‘on the ground’.
In the early hours of 8 September 1888, the body of Annie Chapman, aged forty-seven, was discovered at the rear of No. 29 Hanbury Street in Spitalfields. This time the wounds and mutilation inflicted upon her were even more horrific. A letter purporting to come from the killer arrived at the Central News Agency, postmarked 27 September 1888. It taunted the police and threatened more killings; it was signed with the now infamous sobriquet ‘Jack the Ripper’.
The Ripper struck again on the night of 30 September. The body of forty-five-year-old Elizabeth ‘Long Liz’ Stride was discovered by Louis Diemshitz at 1 a.m. in Dutfield’s Yard, beside the International Working Men’s Educational Society Club building on Berner Street. Only her throat had been cut; it was assumed the killer had been disturbed. Later that night, Jack claimed his second victim. Catherine Eddowes, aged forty-three, was discovered in Mitre Square, more vilely mutilated than any previous victim.
This night of horror was to become known as the ‘double event’ and was concluded with a discovery made by PC Alfred Long of H Division in the doorway of 108-19 Wentworth Model Dwellings, Goulston Street. It was a piece of material, torn from Eddowes’ apron, smeared with blood and faeces, upon which the murderer had wiped his knife and hands. Above the apron fragment, written ‘in a good schoolboy hand’, was the statement ‘The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing’. Sir Charles Warren, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, attended the scene in person, no doubt fearing riots and reprisals against the Jewish population in the East End if such an inflammatory statement became popular knowledge. He overruled the other officers on the scene, had the message copied down and then gave the order to ‘obliterate the writing at once’ – a controversial decision that was to ultimately be a contributing factor to his resignation.
Once the ‘Jack the Ripper’ letter sent to the Central News Agency gained publicity, the floodgates opened for a torrent of letters claiming to know, have knowledge of or even purported to be from Jack the Ripper. Some were illustrated with lurid drawings and lots of red ink; among the most disturbing missives was one sent to George Lusk, Chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. He received a small parcel in the form of a cardboard box. To Lusk’s horror, upon opening the parcel he found the box contained a bloodstained letter and half a human kidney.
The final victim of Jack the Ripper was Mary Jane Kelly, aged twenty-five, who was found on the morning of 9 November 1888 in her rented room at Miller’s Court off Dorset Street. The walls of the room inside were splashed up like an abattoir and on the blood-soaked mattress was a raw carcass, a mass of human evisceration that was once Mary Kelly. Those who saw this horror – seasoned police officers and police surgeons – never forgot what they saw at Miller’s Court. The killer known as Jack the Ripper was never brought to justice and the quest to discover his identity continues to this day.
Dr Thomas Neill Cream was a serial killer. Born in Glasgow in 1850, Cream qualified in medicine in Canada and practiced in Britain, America and Canada; fleeing the countries each time he fell under suspicion for his illegal medical practices, such as abortions, or after suspicion fell upon him for his connection to the deaths of women by poisoning. He was prosecuted for administering poison to Daniel Stott, his mistress’s husband, in 1881 and served ten years of a ‘life’ sentence in Joliet Penitentiary. A few days after Cream’s arrival back in England he was up to his old tricks, convincing prostitutes to take a drink with ‘white stuff’ in it or tablets for supposed medicinal purposes. They died in agony a short time later.
Disappearing back to the States again, Cream returned to London in 1892 and convinced both Emma Shrivell and her companion, Alice Marsh, to sample his deadly wares. Less than an hour later both girls were suffering convulsions. They were removed to St Thomas’s Hospital; one died on the way, the other a short while after arrival. Cream produced posters and letters making accusations to increase his self-importance by demonstrating his knowledge of these crimes. He was soon under arrest, however; a prostitute, to whom he had attempted to give tablets to but who had palmed them away because ‘she didn’t like the look of them’, came forward. His trial was little more than a formality; Cream was found guilty and sentenced to death. On 15 November 1892, just after the hood and noose had been adjusted, executioner Billington pushed the lever and Cream piped up with his last deluded statement: ‘I’m Jack the …’, but the trapdoors fell open and he died with a lie on his lips.
Herman Webster Mudgett, better known under his notorious nom de plume of H.H. Holmes (Dr Henry Howard Holmes), was a sadistic serial killer. He confessed to twenty-seven murders, of which only four were confirmed, but his actual death toll almost certainly runs into the tens, some placing it as high as 200.
Holmes was a graduate of the Michigan Medical School but he soon found he could earn money by killing his friends and wives and claiming the money he had insured them for. Holmes had run a small drugstore in the Englewood suburb of Chicago and speculated in real estate. In the early 1890s, Holmes acquired the lot opposite his drugstore, built a new hotel and relocated the drugstore there. Employing a variety of builders, only Holmes knew exactly what was in the three-storey building, dubbed the ‘Castle’ by the locals. This was a building riddled with fiendish contraptions and devious features; among them spy holes into rooms, gas pipes that could be controlled from Holmes’s office (so he could fill just about any room with gas), and chutes that ran from the upper floors to the basements (so that bodies could be dropped down there). If alive, the victims could be tortured; if dead, there were kilns to cremate them, lime pits to destroy them and even acid baths to burn off the flesh and muscle. After committing these atrocities, Holmes would wire the bones back together and sell them as skeletons to medical schools and students.
The hotel was often packed with visitors for the World’s Fair and Holmes could have his pick of victims. However, after trade at the World’s Fair slumped, Holmes fled from his creditors to Fort Worth, Texas, where he had inherited a property from two sisters – one of whom he had promised to marry, both of whom he murdered! Insurance companies had become wise to scams and Holmes was finding it increasingly difficult to get them to pay out. In spite of this, he pressed on with a plan he had concocted with his associate, Benjamin Pitezel, whereby Holmes would find an appropriate cadaver to take Pitezel’s place, his death would be faked, and Holmes would collect the insurance and share it with Pitezel. Holmes cut out the middle man and just killed Pitezel, along with his wife and two children. The police began to investigate and received a tip-off from a former cellmate of Holmes; they also investigated the places Holmes had been known to reside at – including the ‘Castle’, where they discovered many of his devious and deadly devices. Tracked by members of Pinkerton’s Detective Agency to Boston, where he was arrested, Holmes was tried and found guilty in Philadelphia and was hanged at Moyamensing Prison on 7 May 1896. Before his death, Holmes wrote a rambling confession, in which he claimed to have murdered some people later found to be alive. The veracity of his claims about his life and murders remain difficult to disentangle, but it can be safely assumed that Holmes remains one of the most prolific serial killers of all time.
Norwegian-born Bella ‘Belle’ Gunness migrated to America in 1876, where she soon married and settled in Austin, Illinois. Her career of crime began with the death of her first husband, Mads Sorenson, whose death was attributed to acute colitis, but who she had probably poisoned. Having got away with that and receiving a good payout from the insurance company, she began purchasing properties, they would suffer a mysterious fire, she would claim the insurance money, then move on and repeat the process. Her second husband, Peter Gunness, also had his life cut short, after a hatchet slipped from a shelf and struck him on the head – or at least that is what Belle told the jury, who believed her.
Gunness eventually established herself and her children in a farm about one and a half miles out of the town of La Porte, Indiana, and advertised herself in Chicago newspapers as an attractive widow of means seeking a gentleman of wealth and cultured tastes with the object of matrimony. She would correspond with the potential suitor and find out what relatives or friends they had, and those she believed would be missed least were invited to join her on the farm, bringing with them a monetary token of good faith. She would then kill the suitor, relieve him of his cash and valuables, and bury his body on the farm, usually under the hog-lot. Her grim business ended on 28 April 1908 when a fire swept through the farmhouse; the badly burned bodies of Gunness and her children were found within (Gunness was found decapitated).
Some of the realtives of those men who had visited Gunness became suspicious, and so an investigator and his team took spades to the farm and began to dig. The remains of about twelve bodies, mostly those of men, were uncovered but among them the corpses of one woman and two children were also found. Tragically, the methods of recovery were crude and only a handful of the victims were identified. Estimates place the total number of deaths at the hands of Gunness over the years at over forty people. Whether the headless body of the woman found in the fire was actually that of Belle Gunness has still not been proven beyond doubt and ‘sightings’ of her in other parts of America were being made as late as 1931.
While Belle Gunness may have the infamy, her death toll does not come close to that of Jane Toppan. Toppan had trained as a nurse at the Cambridge Hospital in Middlesex County, Massachusetts in the 1880s, where she began to use the patients under her care for her own experiments with morphine and atropine. Toppan would administer a drug mixture to the patient she chose as her victim, then lie in bed with them as she derived a sexual thrill when they were near death. After a brief sojourn at the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital, she was dismissed and found work as a private family nurse. During this time she carried on her crimes, killing her landlords to avoid rent arrears, her patients, and she even got rid of her own foster sister with a dose of strychnine. Toppan obtained a place in the household of the Davis family in Cataumet, Massachusetts in 1901. Within weeks Toppan had killed the head of the household, the elderly Mr Alden Davis, and his two daughters. Surviving members of the family were dissatisfied with these sudden deaths and ordered a toxicology exam to be performed on Davis’s younger daughter. Traces of poison were found and police arrested Toppan for murder. While in custody, Toppan confessed to a total of thirty-one murders. She is quoted as saying that her ambition was ‘to have killed more people – helpless people – than any other man or woman who ever lived.’ Found not guilty by reason of insanity, Toppan was committed to the Taunton Insane Hospital for life and she died there in 1938.
John George Haigh was a man who wanted to live the high life of a gentleman, with hotel accommodation, flash cars and club ties, but he simply did not have the money and decided he could ‘get rich quick’ by committing a fraud, which landed him in prison. Next he tried murder for gain. He killed his first victims, Mr and Mrs McSwan (parents of one of Haigh’s former employers), at No. 79 Gloucester Road in London. He placed their bodies in 40-gallon drums filled with sulphuric acid, which soon dissolved their corpses to sludge that he tipped down the drain.
Haigh stole the McSwan’s pensions, cheque books and even sold their properties, raising himself thousands of pounds, and moved into the Onslow Court Hotel in Kensington. Haigh had a problem with gambling, which, combined with his expensive lifestyle, soon saw him running short of money, and so he found another couple to kill. On 12 February 1948, Haigh lured Dr Archibald Henderson and his wife Rose to his small workshop at No. 2 Leopold Road in Crawley, West Sussex. When they arrived Haigh shot them both in the head, before he disposed of their bodies, once again in drums of acid. His final victim was Mrs Olive Durand-Deacon who, like Haigh, resided at the Onslow Court Hotel. Haigh took her to his workshop and sent her the same way as the others. Mrs Durand-Deacon, however, had a friend who became suspicious and reported her missing to the police. Mentioning her acquaintance with Haigh, the police looked into his background and his criminal record and had his workshop searched, which revealed Mrs Durand-Deacon’s coat, along with papers referring to the Hendersons and McSwans. They also discovered a .38 Enfield revolver and eight rounds of ammunition. Pathologist Keith Simpson also conducted an investigation into some sludge found at the workshop and discovered three human gallstones and part of a denture, which was later identified by Mrs Durand-Deacon’s dentist.
Haigh was arrested and charged with murder. He tried to convince the authorities he was mad, claiming he drank the blood of his victims, however, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was executed at Wandsworth Prison by Albert Pierrepoint on 10 August 1949. Haigh bequeathed his clothing to Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors specifically for the wax figure they would make of him. He sent instructions that it must always be kept in perfect condition, the trousers creased, the hair parted and one inch of shirt cuffs showing.
Henri Désiré Landru was a convicted fraudster who took to representing himself, under a variety of aliases, as an eligible bachelor who would attract women with adverts placed in the lonely hearts columns of Parisian newspapers with promises to marry. He would ensure he gained control of his new beau’s finances, then the unfortunate woman would disappear and Landru would move on to his next victim. Acquiring enough money to buy the Villa Ermitage at Gambais, a village south of Paris, Landru installed it with a large stove, thus creating his own cremation oven; the bodies of a number of successive victims were cut up and incinerated within it. Indeed, locals who passed the villa would comment on the black smoke that billowed from the chimney on occasion. Suspicion eventually fell upon Landru and he was arrested on 12 April 1919. A notebook found in one of his pockets revealed cryptic notes on all of his eleven victims. A search of Villa Ermitage also revealed some of their clothes and papers but the actual remains of his victims proved elusive, only bone fragments were found and Landru was totally uncooperative. His defence hinged on his belief that he could not be convicted unless a body was found and even when confronted by damning evidence he would reply that his knowledge of the matter was ‘his secret’ and that French law allowed him to remain silent. Despite this, Landru was found guilty and went to the guillotine on 25 February 1922 – he took his secrets with him. In 1967, a drawing given by Landru to his defence counsel during his trial was made public, it showed the kitchen and the stove and bore the following message on the reverse: ‘Ce n’est pas le mur derrière lequel il se passe quelque chose, mais bien la cuisinière dans laquelle on a brûlé quelque chose’ (It is not the wall behind which a thing takes place, but indeed the stove in which a thing has been burned).
Peter Kürten was a thief, arsonist and a sadistic psychopath, who carried out a series of horrific sexual assaults, hammer attacks, rapes and murder of women and children around Düsseldorf, Germany between 1925 and 1930. Kürten’s capture came after an encounter with a servant girl named Maria Budlick, who he took back to his home before offering to walk her to a hostel. As the pair walked through Grafenberger Wald he attempted to force himself on the girl and seized her throat. Curiously, he suddenly released his grip and asked Budlick if she remembered where he lived; she said she did not and he left her alone. Budlick was able to lead police to the street where Kürten lived but she chose the wrong house. Kürten saw the police and knew they were on to him so he confessed to his wife and fled. She informed the police and Kürten was soon under arrest. Kürten confessed to seventy-nine offences and was charged with nine murders and seven attempted murders; he was found guilty and sentenced to death. While in the condemned cell Kürten revealed in interviews with Dr Karl Berg that the sight of blood was integral to his sexual stimulation and that it was his dying wish that he would hear the blood gush from his own neck when his head was severed from his body by the blade of the guillotine that he was executed with on 2 July 1931.
Friedrich Heinrich Karl ‘Fritz’ Haarmann was a convicted thief, fraudster and child molester who, upon his release from prison in 1918, began a series of sexually motivated murders of teenage boys and men. When human remains were washed up on the Leine River in May and June 1924, police decided to drag the river and discovered more than 500 human bones, which were later confirmed as having come from at least twenty-two individuals. Haarmann was the prime suspect and was put under police surveillance. He was soon arrested after he was observed in the act of attempting to get a boy to return with him to his apartment. The room was searched and, to the horror of the investigators, a number of walls were found to be spattered with bloodstains. Haarmann tried to explain this away as the result of his illegal trade as a backstreet butcher. Clothing and possessions of a number of missing young men were found in the apartment and Haarmann soon confessed under questioning. He claimed to have been responsible for the murders of between fifty and seventy boys and men, but the police were only able to connect him to the disappearance of twenty-seven. The trial lasted barely two weeks and Haarmann was found guilty of twenty-four of the twenty-seven counts of murder brought against him. He was executed by guillotine on 15 April 1925. Haarmann’s decapitated head was preserved in a jar by scientists in order to examine the structure of his brain, and is now kept at the Göttingen Medical School in Germany.
George Joseph Smith had a long history of petty crime, going as far back as to his youth in the East End of London in the late nineteenth century. He married Caroline Thornhill in 1898 and over the next ten years he bigamously married two other women. Between 1908 and 1914 Smith entered into a further fourteen bigamous marriages under a variety of aliases. He would then draw off what valuables and money he could from each of these women and then disappear – he would also deprive three of them of their lives. Smith disposed of them in what he engineered to appear as drowning accidents in bath tubs.
His first victim, Beatrice ‘Bessie’ Munday, married Smith when he was under the alias of Henry Williams in 1910. He then disappeared, but Miss Munday saw him again by chance at Weston-super-Mare in 1912 and the besotted girl believed his excuses; the couple were reconciled and made wills in each other’s favour. Smith then bought a zinc bath and within days the poor girl was found drowned in it at their house in Herne Bay. The inquest had hardly concluded her death an accident when Smith was off again, but he made sure he returned the bath and got his money back before he left. His next victim was Nurse Alice Burnham, who apparently drowned in the bath at a house on Regents Road, Blackpool. Death by misadventure was returned and Smith made £500 when her life insurance paid out.
In December 1914, Smith bigamously married Elizabeth Lofty under the alias of ‘John Lloyd’ at Bath and took up lodgings on Bismarck Road, Highgate in London. The day after they moved in, the landlady heard some struggling sounds from the bathroom and a short while later ‘Mr Lloyd’ was heard playing the organ. As water began to drip through the downstairs ceiling Lloyd appeared at the front door with a bag of tomatoes in his hand, which he claimed to have just been out to buy for Mrs Lloyd’s supper. The pair went upstairs and discovered Mrs Lloyd dead in the bath. Death was recorded as misadventure but the case made the national papers and one of Alice Burnham’s relatives saw it, was struck by the similarities between the two incidents and reported their concerns to the police. Smith was investigated and after initially being arrested for making a false entry on a marriage certificate, the investigation revealed his aliases and the charge was altered to one of murder. Found guilty, Smith was sentenced to death and was hanged by John Ellis at Maidstone Prison on 13 August 1915.
Frederick Bailey Deeming was an unusual character. He was a muscular, hard-faced but handsome man and he was adventurous, having travelled throughout the continent, India, America, Australia and New Zealand – he had even worked on the gold fields of South Africa. Always flamboyantly dressed and supremely confident, he carried off impostures such as Lord Dunn and as an HM Inspector of Regiments. Those who knew the real Frederick Deeming called him ‘Mad Fred’; he was a man who had carried out a host of minor crimes such as theft and embezzlements throughout his travels but had always managed to evade prosecution.
Deeming married an English girl and had four children by her, all of whom he left destitute in Australia. In 1890, he was back on his home territory of Merseyside, had a new residence at Rainhill and was courting pretty Emily Mather. All of this looked like it would be ruined when Mrs Deeming turned up with the four children. Explaining her away as his sister, Deeming sought a more permanent separation and smashed his wife and children’s heads in with a pickaxe and buried them under the floor of the villa. Deeming and Emily Mather were soon married and on their way to Australia, allegedly on HM Inspector business. Within a few days of landing at Melbourne, Deeming murdered Emily and buried her under the hearthstone of their rented house in Windsor. When Deeming left, a prospective new tenant complained to the landlord about the disagreeable smell in the bedroom; the hearthstone was lifted and Emily’s trussed-up body was discovered, her head smashed in and her throat cut. Deeming was traced and stood trial at Melbourne, where much was made of his mental state caused by advanced VD. It was said he went out hunting at night for the woman who gave it to him because ‘he believed in the extermination of such women’. Found guilty, while in the condemned cell the story got out that Deeming had confessed to the ‘Jack the Ripper’ killings of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes in London’s East End in 1888.
Deeming was executed on 23 May 1892 in front of a crowd of 10,000; he contemptuously smoked a cigar as he mounted the scaffold. A cast of his head was taken after his execution and one of the castings was sent to Scotland Yard’s Black Museum in London, where for many years the curator would indicate this as ‘The death mask of Jack the Ripper’. Deeming was, in fact, in South Africa during the period of the Ripper crimes.
This is an address so infamous that a book and a film were named after it. Timothy Evans lived at 10 Rillington Place in the Ladbroke Grove area of Notting Hill, London, with his wife, Beryl, and their baby daughter, Geraldine. Money was tight and arguments between the pair were frequent. When Beryl found that she was pregnant again in 1949, she decided to have an abortion. What happened next is unclear but Evans travelled back to his native Wales and walked into Merthyr Tydfil police station, where he confessed to murdering his wife and putting her body down the drain at 10 Rillington Place. Police went to investigate but found no body in the drain; they did, however, find her body wrapped in a tablecloth in the wash house in the back garden, the body of Geraldine was also found with that of her mother. Curiously, Evans had failed to mention the murder of his child in his first confession. The case against Evans was brought to court and further evidence provided by their downstairs neighbour, First World War veteran and ex-War Reserve Constable Mr Reginald Christie, sealed the case against Evans and he went to the gallows on 9 March 1950.
Three years later, Christie vacated his flat and the new tenant, Mr Beresford Brown, removed the wallpaper sealing the pantry door in the kitchen and was horrified to discover a number of dead bodies within. The police were summoned and investigations revealed the three women to be Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan. A further search of the building and grounds turned up three more bodies – Christie’s wife, Ethel, who was buried under the floorboards of the front room, and Ruth Fuerst and Muriel Eady, a former co-worker with Christie, who were discovered buried in the small back garden. Christie claimed that he had lost his memory and went wandering around London, sleeping rough until he was recognised and arrested by PC Thomas Ledger on the Embankment near Putney Bridge.
It appears that Christie was only able to carry out the sexual act with semi-conscious and unconscious women. He would trick his victims into using an inhaler that he had connected to a gas pipe. Once stupefied, he would rape the women as they died, placing a ligature around their neck to strangle them if they appeared to regain their senses. Christie was only tried for the murder of his wife; he pleaded insanity but was found fully culpable and guilty, and was executed at Pentonville by Albert Pierrepoint on 15 July 1953. While in custody, Christie confessed to the murder of Beryl Evans but denied killing baby Geraldine. An enquiry was opened into Evans’ trial and he was given a posthumous pardon in October 1966.
In Boston, Massachusetts, the thirteen murders of women aged between nineteen and eighty-five, committed between 1962 and 1964, were attributed to the ‘Boston Strangler’. Albert DeSalvo was tried for the murders, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1967 – he was stabbed to death by as yet unidentified assailants at the maximum security Walpole State Prison in 1973. Subsequent research into the Boston Strangler murders suggests there may well have been more than one killer.
In one of the most horrific murder cases in modern Britain, builder Frederick West, later joined by his wife Rosemary, abducted, raped, tortured and killed at least eleven girls and young women between 1967 and 1987. Among the victims was Rose’s stepdaughter, Charmaine, murdered to break links with Fred’s first wife, and the death of one of the couple’s own daughters, Heather, in 1987. The majority of the murders were committed by the couple between 1973 and 1979 at their home at 25 Cromwell Street in Gloucester. It was here, whilst Fred was being investigated for rape, police interviews with the West’s children revealed that West would threaten his children by ‘joking’ about ‘Heather being under the patio’, which led police to obtain a search warrant to excavate the garden in February 1994. Shortly afterwards human remains were indeed found in the garden. Fred and Rose West were brought before the Gloucester magistrates court on 30 June 1994, where he was charged with eleven and she with ten counts of murder. Fred West hanged himself while on remand at Winson Green Prison, Birmingham on 1 January 1995. Rosemary West, however, was brought to trial and was found guilty of ten murders on 22 November 1995; she was sentenced to a whole life tariff by Home Secretary Jack Straw in 1997. Rose offered no confession but Fred West claimed to have killed more, indeed, the police are convinced the couple were responsible for more murders.
On 22 February 2008, forklift truck driver Steven Wright was convicted of the murders of five young women in the Ipswich area between 30 October and 10 December 2006. Wright admitted to regularly using prostitutes; all of his victims came from the red light area of the town. Curiously, all of the victims were discovered naked, there was no sign of sexual assault and two of his victims were left deliberately posed in a cruciform position, however, at the time of writing, Wright has yet to reveal his motives for committing the murders. When passing sentence, the judge recommended that Wright should never be released. Wright is under investigation in connection with a number of other disappearances and unsolved murders outside the Ipswich area.
This list is of non-medical, political or military killers based on the highest verified number of victims of a killer working alone.
|
Country or Countries |
Proven Victims |
Active Years |
|
|
Luis Alfredo ‘The Beast’ Garavito |
Columbia |
138 |
1990s |
|
Pedro Alonso ‘Monster of the Andes’ López |
Columbia, Peru, Ecuador |
110 |
1969–80 |
|
Daniel Barbosa |
Columbia, Ecuador |
72 |
1974–86 |
|
Pedro Rodrigues Filho |
Brazil |
71 |
1967–03 |
|
Gary ‘The Green River Killer’ Ridgway |
USA |
71 |
1982–2000 |
|
Yang ‘Monster Killer’ Xinhai |
China |
67 |
2000–03 |
|
Andrei ‘The Rostov Ripper’ Chikatilo |
Soviet Union, Ukraine |
53 |
1978–90 |
|
Anatoly ‘Citizen O’ Onoprienko |
Soviet Union, Ukraine |
52 |
1989–96 |
|
Alexander ‘The Chessboard Killer’ Pichushkin |
Russia |
48 |
1992–06 |
|
Ahmad Suradji |
Indonesia |
42 |
1986–97 |
|
Moses Sithole |
South Africa |
38 |
1994–95 |
|
Serhiy Tkach |
Soviet Union, Ukraine |
36 |
1984–05 |
|
Gennady Mikhasevich |
Soviet Union, Belerus |
36 |
1971–85 |
|
Ted Bundy |
USA |
35 |
1974–78 |
|
John Wayne ‘Killer Clown’ Gacy |
USA |
33 |
1972–78 |