Every one of these lives began with a handover. A baby was given up by a mother who was seventeen, or who died, or who walked away. A grandmother and grandfather signed papers and raised their daughter’s child as their own. A Boston orphanage bound a small girl to a family in Lowell, Massachusetts. Then, years or decades later, came a courtroom, a guilty plea, an execution chamber or a hospital ward for the criminally insane.
Lists of adopted killers have circulated for years, often with a statistic attached about how many serial murderers were adopted. The court files tell a narrower and more useful story: who gave the child up, who took the child in, what the courts later found, and what the killers and the doctors who examined them said about where it began. Some of these people were convicted of murder many times over. One was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Two killed in a single terrible day and are not serial killers at all. Each was raised by someone other than the parents who brought them into the world.
Aileen Wuornos was born on February 29, 1956, in Michigan; Britannica gives the birthplace as Rochester and her original surname as Pittman, and she testified in 1992 that she had been born in Troy. Her parents were teenagers who separated around the time of her birth, according to the defense experts who described her childhood in her Volusia County case. Her father, Leo Pittman, was sent to prison and later hanged himself there. The psychologist and writer Phyllis Chesler, who studied the case, wrote that Wuornos never met him.
Her mother, Diane, left Aileen and her older brother, Keith, while they were very small. Arlene Pralle, who later adopted Wuornos as an adult, told a Marion County jury in 1992 that the children had been abandoned at about six months old. Their maternal grandparents took them in and legally adopted them. Wuornos testified that she was about ten when she learned that the people raising her were her grandparents and not her parents.
The house was not a gentle one. Pralle testified that the grandfather, an alcoholic, beat the girl severely; Wuornos herself denied in one hearing that he had abused her, and an uncle who grew up in the same house described the family as "pretty straight." At about fourteen she gave birth to a son, who was placed for adoption. By sixteen she was living on her own and selling sex, which she went on doing, by her own count in court, for about twenty years.
Between late 1989 and late 1990 she shot seven middle-aged men who had picked her up on or near Florida’s highways and took their cars, money and belongings. A Volusia County jury convicted her of the first degree murder of Richard Mallory, a Clearwater store owner, in January 1992. She pleaded no contest or guilty to five more killings in Marion, Citrus, Pasco and Dixie counties and received six death sentences in all. She admitted the seventh killing, of Peter Siems, whose body has not been found, but was never charged with it. She claimed self-defense for years, then told a judge in 2001 that she had killed the men to rob them. Florida executed her by lethal injection on October 9, 2002. She was 46.
The man who called himself the Son of Sam was born on June 1, 1953, in Brooklyn. His mother, Betty Broder, had a long relationship with a married Brooklyn businessman, Joseph Kleinman, and the baby was registered under the surname Falco, according to a 2011 study of Berkowitz’s life in the Pace Law Review. Britannica gives his birth name as David Falco; the Pace Law Review says he was Richard David Falco, and that his new parents simply reversed his first and middle names.
Those parents were Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz, a childless couple in the Bronx. Nathan owned a small hardware store. Britannica describes the boy as difficult and at times violent, and says his behavior grew more erratic after Pearl Berkowitz died of cancer in 1967. In 1971, the year he finished high school, his father remarried and moved to Florida without him.
Between July 1976 and July 1977, Berkowitz shot thirteen people in eight attacks in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, most of them young women. Six died. A parking ticket written near the last shooting led detectives to his car in Yonkers, and he was arrested on August 10, 1977. On May 8, 1978, against the advice of his lawyers, he pleaded guilty to all six murders. He received the maximum of 25 years to life for each.
He has since tied his crimes to the circumstances of his birth. In a filmed interview released in 2025, as Time reported, he said that when he learned he was adopted he "was so angry, I blamed others," and that he began committing crimes to make people pay attention to him. He has been eligible for parole since 2002. In a letter to the governor before his first hearing he wrote that he believed he deserved to be in prison for the rest of his life, and a two-member panel refused him that July. In May 2024, at 70, he was refused for the twelfth time; he was then held at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Wallkill, New York.
Kenneth Bianchi was born in Rochester, New York, on May 22, 1951. His mother was seventeen. In August of that year he was adopted by a Rochester couple and grew up as their only child, according to an essay by the historian Daryl C. McClary for HistoryLink.org, the online encyclopedia of Washington state history. HistoryLink’s account says he lied, had a quick temper and threw violent tantrums as a boy, and that he did poorly in school despite better than average intelligence. His adoptive father died in 1965. He wanted to be a police officer; a sheriff’s department turned him down, and he became a private security guard instead.
Through his adoptive family he was related to Angelo Buono Jr., an older Rochester man who by the mid-1970s ran an automobile upholstery shop in Glendale, California. Bianchi moved west to join him. Between October 1977 and February 1978, ten women and girls between the ages of twelve and twenty-eight were killed in the Los Angeles area; the press called the unknown killer the Hillside Strangler.
The case broke four hundred miles away. On January 11, 1979, two Western Washington University students, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, disappeared in Bellingham, Washington. Bianchi, then working as a security guard in the town, was arrested the next day. Within days Los Angeles detectives had linked him to the Hillside killings. He claimed a second personality had committed the crimes; a prosecution psychiatrist concluded he was faking it. In October 1979, to avoid a possible death sentence, he pleaded guilty to the two Bellingham murders and to five murders in Los Angeles County, with other charges, and agreed to testify against Buono. His testimony wandered so badly that prosecutors tried to abandon the case, but in November 1983 a jury convicted Buono of nine of the ten killings.
Bianchi has since denied his guilt. In 2023 he legally changed his name to Anthony D’Amato. In July 2025 Washington’s sentence review board declined to release him and added ten years to his minimum term, and California denied him parole for ten more years. On October 22, 2026, the Washington Department of Corrections listed him at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.
Joseph Kallinger was adopted at the age of four by a Philadelphia couple who abused him severely, according to a writeup in the Dengrove Collection at the University of Virginia School of Law Library, which holds courtroom sketches from his trial. He grew up to work as a shoemaker in the city. The same writeup records that as a grown man he abused his first wife, who left him, and his second, whom he married in 1958 and with whom he had five children. Psychologists who examined him after his arrest measured his IQ at 82 and diagnosed schizophrenia.
In 1974 and early 1975 he and his young son forced their way into homes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The New Jersey Supreme Court, writing in 1988, called it a criminal rampage across both states, in which the people inside were threatened and abused while they were robbed. The last of the invasions, in Leonia, New Jersey, on January 8, 1975, ended with the killing of Maria Fasching, a licensed practical nurse who had come to the house to see a friend. She was stabbed to death.
Juries in two states heard his insanity defense and rejected it. A Pennsylvania jury convicted him of robbery and other crimes in Dauphin County, and in October 1976 a Bergen County jury found him guilty of Fasching’s murder; he was sentenced to life, to follow his Pennsylvania term. Two earlier deaths came to court only years later. In 1974 two boys had died in Philadelphia: Kallinger’s own son, Joseph Jr., who was fourteen, and Jose Collazo, a ten-year-old from the neighborhood. The deaths stayed officially unsolved until 1983, when a book written with Kallinger’s cooperation described both killings. He was charged in Philadelphia that July, and by 1988, United Press International reported, he was serving two life sentences for the two murders. He spent long stretches at Farview State Hospital, Pennsylvania’s hospital for mentally ill offenders, and died in prison in 1996, New Jersey 101.5 reported, of a seizure.
What is known of Gerald Stano’s first year comes from the psychologist who examined him for his defense after his arrest. Dr. Ann McMillan reported, as the court records describe her findings, that he was taken from his birth mother at about six months old because of extreme neglect, and that he was then functioning at what she called an "animalistic level." A team that assessed him for adoption at thirteen months judged him unadoptable. He was adopted all the same and grew up as Gerald Eugene Stano. McMillan linked that early neglect to his lifelong difficulty in coping with ordinary life.
As an adult he worked as a short-order cook and lived in Ormond Beach, north of Daytona Beach, Florida. On April 1, 1980, Daytona Beach police arrested him after a woman reported that he had attacked her in a motel room and she had escaped. Within hours he confessed to killing Mary Carol Maher, a twenty-year-old college student whose body had been found that January. Over the next two years, mostly in sessions with a detective sergeant named Paul Crow, he confessed to many more. News reports later put his total at forty-one women in Florida, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Courts in Volusia, Brevard and Seminole counties, and a circuit court sitting in Bradford County, convicted him of first-degree murder case after case, most often on his own guilty pleas, once on a jury verdict and once on a judge’s. Some of those convictions carried life sentences; others carried death. His lawyers argued for years that Crow had fed him details and that many of the confessions were false; state and federal judges heard those claims and rejected them. He was executed in Florida’s electric chair on March 23, 1998, for the murder of Cathy Lee Scharf, a seventeen-year-old from Port Orange who disappeared in December 1973. In a written statement released afterward, he said he had confessed to crimes he did not commit. None of his convictions was ever set aside.
Charles Albright was adopted in 1933, when he was about three weeks old, by a Dallas grocer and his wife, and grew up in Oak Cliff, south of downtown. Skip Hollandsworth, who wrote the fullest account of his life for Texas Monthly in 1993, described the adoptive mother as strict, frugal and overprotective. She punished him with confinement and spankings, taught him manners and respect for women, and pushed his schooling so hard that he skipped two grades. At eleven, with her help, he took a taxidermy course by mail. He graduated from high school at fifteen.
The rest of his life ran on two tracks. Friends knew a charming, generous man, a churchgoer, a self-taught painter who sang in churches and played piano and organ. The police knew a thief and forger, arrested in his freshman year of college as part of a student burglary ring and later caught forging academic records, including a master’s degree, that won him a job teaching high school science. His adoptive mother died in 1981 and his adoptive father in 1986.
Between December 1990 and March 1991 three women who worked as prostitutes in Oak Cliff were found shot dead: Mary Lou Pratt, Susan Beth Peterson and Shirley Williams. Albright was arrested on March 22, 1991. In December 1991 a Dallas County jury convicted him of murdering Shirley Williams, and he was sentenced to life. Texas Monthly called it the first murder conviction in the history of the Dallas County district attorney’s office to rest on hair evidence alone. He was never tried for the other two deaths, which police and prosecutors attributed to him, and he denied all three. In 2020 his trial lawyer told the Dallas station KRLD that a laboratory reexamining the hair samples for the county’s conviction integrity units had reported they were not human. No court action on the results was reported. Albright died in state custody in 2020, at 87.
Steven Catlin’s adoptive mother, Martha, was seventy-nine when she died in December 1984, after swallowing a large amount of paraquat, a herbicide that destroys the lungs. She was not the first person close to him to die that way. His fourth wife, Joyce, had died in 1976 of lung failure after nineteen days in the hospital; her doctors suspected paraquat, but no test then could find it after seventy-two hours. His fifth wife, Glenna, died of paraquat poisoning in 1984.
According to a brief the California attorney general filed with the United States Supreme Court in September 2025, Catlin was paid on two insurance policies after Joyce’s death, and a credit union program cleared the debt on a vehicle. He collected 55,000 dollars from Glenna’s life insurance. He was Martha’s only beneficiary, and he was reported to have said that he wished she would "hurry up and die."
A Monterey County jury convicted him of Glenna’s murder in 1986. In 1990 a Kern County jury convicted him of the first degree murders of Joyce and of his adoptive mother, found that Martha’s murder was committed by poison, for financial gain and as one of multiple murders, and returned a verdict of death. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in 2001, and state and federal courts rejected his later challenges. His lawyers argued in 2025 that his trial attorneys had failed to investigate brain damage and childhood abuse; they had obtained his adoption file, the state answered, which described the circumstances of his birth and his adoptive family. As of September 2025 he remained under sentence of death.
He was born Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski in Essen, West Germany, on November 6, 1946, to an unmarried mother. According to the Stuttgarter Zeitung, she left him in the hospital’s infant ward and died soon afterward; the Berlin daily taz, writing in 1991, said she died of tuberculosis shortly after the birth. For his first eleven months he was cared for by nurses working in shifts. Then a master butcher and his wife, a childless couple who ran two busy shops in the working-class district of Katernberg, took him home. The taz reported that the Essen youth welfare office hesitated over what it called the child’s "dubious origins," and that the formal adoption came only seven years later. That was when Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski became Jürgen Bartsch.
In letters he later wrote from confinement to the American journalist Paul Moor, as the taz summarized them, Bartsch described years of being shut in at home, forbidden to play with other children and regularly beaten, while his parents worked in the shop. At about eleven he was sent to a Catholic boarding school run by the Salesians on the Rhine. The forensic psychiatrist Norbert Leygraf, interviewed by the Stuttgarter Zeitung in 2016, pointed to a child’s first year as the time when a basic attitude to the world takes shape, depending on whether the baby feels wanted and whether anyone answers its crying, and said the adoptive mother’s rigid, unpredictable moods made the boy’s disorder worse.
Between 1962 and 1966, beginning when he was fifteen, Bartsch killed four boys. The first, named by the German broadcaster ZDF as Klaus-Herrmann J., was eight. The killings ended when a fifth boy got away and went to the police, and on June 21, 1966, officers arrested Bartsch, then a nineteen-year-old butcher’s apprentice, in Velbert. He confessed quickly. In December 1967 the regional court in Wuppertal sentenced him to life under adult law, amid crowds and a press frenzy. The Federal Court of Justice overturned the verdict, and in April 1971 a court in Düsseldorf convicted him of murder, with other charges, and sentenced him to ten years of youth detention followed by commitment to a closed psychiatric institution. He was held at the state hospital in Eickelborn, near Soest. On April 28, 1976, he died there during an operation he had asked for, after an error with the anesthetic. He was 29.
Jane Toppan was never adopted, and she was never convicted of anything. She was born Honora A. Kelley in Boston, the daughter of Irish immigrants, Peter Kelley and Bridget Finn, according to the Lowell Historical Society, which has worked from census returns and the records of the Boston Female Asylum. Her birth year is uncertain. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was very young. In February 1863 her father, a tailor, asked the asylum, a home for destitute girls, to take Honora and her slightly older sister, Delia; the managers judged his habits unfit for raising them.
In November 1864 the asylum bound Honora to Mrs. Ann C. Toppan of Lowell. Under the indenture she could be returned at any time before she turned eighteen. She was never legally adopted, but she took the family’s name and was known in Lowell as Jennie Toppan. She trained as a nurse in Cambridge and at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and became a private nurse in Cambridge, trusted by doctors and by the families who sent for her.
In the summer of 1901 she was staying with the Davis family of Lowell at their cottage in Cataumet, on Cape Cod. Within weeks the mother, both married daughters and the father were dead. She was arrested in October 1901. On June 23, 1902, she was tried at Barnstable for the death of one of the daughters, Mary D. Gibbs, and found not guilty by reason of insanity; she was committed to the Taunton Insane Hospital for life. Boston Magazine reports that during her psychiatric evaluation she confessed to thirty-one killings; the magazine names morphine and atropine as the drugs she used. Those confessions were never tested in court. She died at the Taunton hospital in August 1938; the Lowell Historical Society gives the date as August 22, the West End Museum as August 18.
Thomas Hamilton was not a serial killer. On the morning of March 13, 1996, he walked into Dunblane Primary School in Scotland and shot dead a teacher, Gwen Mayor, and sixteen children, then shot himself. The public inquiry led by Lord Cullen, presented to Parliament that October, set out his life in detail.
He was born in Glasgow on May 10, 1952, as Thomas Watt, the son of Thomas Watt and Agnes Graham Hamilton or Watt. His parents separated soon after his birth and divorced in 1955. He and his mother moved into her parents' home in the Cranhill district of Glasgow, and on March 26, 1956, his grandparents adopted him. His name became Thomas Watt Hamilton. He grew up believing that his natural mother was his sister. The family moved to Stirling in 1963, and he stayed in touch with his mother as an adult, visiting her about twice a week, the inquiry found.
When he learned who his mother was has never been established. He was never tried for anything at Dunblane; he died there.
Robert Coulson’s crime, too, was a single event rather than a series. On November 13, 1992, five members of his adoptive family were killed in the family’s home in Houston: his adoptive parents, Otis and Mary Coulson; their adopted daughters, Sarah and Robin; and Robin’s husband, Richard Wentworth. All five died of asphyxia. Robin, the federal appeals court noted, was Coulson’s natural sister, and both had been adopted by Otis and Mary.
Prosecutors argued that he killed his family to inherit his parents' estate as their only heir. His roommate confessed to helping plan the killings and to driving him to and from the house, and testified for the state. On June 16, 1994, a Texas jury convicted Coulson of capital murder, and six days later he was sentenced to death. The Fifth Circuit rejected his federal appeal in August 2001. Texas executed him on June 25, 2002. His last words began, "I’m innocent."
The killers themselves have offered the most direct answers, and they are not reliable witnesses. Berkowitz has said his rage over his adoption set him on his path; he once blamed a neighbor’s dog, and later admitted he had invented the story. Bartsch, writing from confinement, blamed the house where he was shut away and beaten. Catlin’s lawyers pointed to childhood trauma. Wuornos’s lawyers pointed to abandonment, and her own family disputed the worst of what was said.
The clinicians quoted in these cases speak in narrower terms. Leygraf’s view of Bartsch rested on the first year of life, on neglect and a cold, erratic home, not on adoption itself. McMillan’s view of Stano rested on the extreme neglect of his first six months, before any adoption took place. Several of these children were neglected, abandoned or beaten before or after the papers were signed, and the experts who testified about them spoke of those injuries rather than of adoption itself. Albright’s adoptive mother, by Texas Monthly’s account, was strict and protective rather than cruel, and pushed him two grades ahead in school.
• February 1863: Honora Kelley, later known as Jane Toppan, and her sister are taken into the Boston Female Asylum.
• November 1864: Honora Kelley is bound to Mrs. Ann C. Toppan of Lowell, Massachusetts.
• June 23, 1902: Toppan is found not guilty by reason of insanity at Barnstable and committed to the Taunton Insane Hospital.
• 1933: Charles Albright, about three weeks old, is adopted by a Dallas grocer and his wife.
• August 1938: Toppan dies at the Taunton hospital.
• November 6, 1946: Karl-Heinz Sadrozinski is born in Essen; he is formally adopted as Jürgen Bartsch about seven years later.
• August 1951: Kenneth Bianchi, born in Rochester, New York, on May 22, is adopted by a Rochester couple.
• May 10, 1952: Thomas Hamilton is born in Glasgow as Thomas Watt.
• June 1, 1953: David Berkowitz is born in Brooklyn under the surname Falco; he is adopted by Nathan and Pearl Berkowitz.
• February 29, 1956: Aileen Wuornos is born in Michigan; she and her brother are later adopted by their maternal grandparents.
• March 26, 1956: Hamilton’s grandparents adopt him.
• 1962 to 1966: Bartsch kills four boys; he is arrested in Velbert on June 21, 1966.
• December 1967: the Wuppertal court sentences Bartsch to life; the verdict is later overturned.
• April 1971: a Düsseldorf court sentences Bartsch to youth detention and psychiatric commitment.
• 1974 to January 8, 1975: Joseph Kallinger’s killings in Philadelphia and in Leonia, New Jersey.
• 1976: Joyce Catlin dies of lung failure; Kallinger is convicted of murder in Bergen County in October.
• April 28, 1976: Bartsch dies at Eickelborn.
• July 1976 to July 1977: the Son of Sam shootings in New York; Berkowitz is arrested on August 10, 1977.
• October 1977 to February 1978: the Hillside Strangler killings in the Los Angeles area.
• May 8, 1978: Berkowitz pleads guilty to six murders.
• January 1979: Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder are killed in Bellingham, Washington; Bianchi is arrested on January 12.
• October 1979: Bianchi pleads guilty in Washington and in Los Angeles County.
• April 1, 1980: Gerald Stano is arrested in Daytona Beach and confesses to the killing of Mary Carol Maher.
• 1983: Kallinger is charged in Philadelphia with the 1974 killings of two boys.
• 1984: Glenna Catlin and Martha Catlin die of paraquat poisoning.
• 1986: Steven Catlin is convicted of Glenna Catlin’s murder in Monterey County.
• November 1989 to November 1990: Wuornos shoots seven men in Florida.
• 1990: a Kern County jury convicts Catlin of two more murders and returns a verdict of death.
• December 1990 to March 1991: three women are shot dead in Oak Cliff, Dallas; Albright is arrested on March 22, 1991.
• January 1991: Wuornos is arrested near Daytona Beach.
• December 1991: Albright is convicted of the murder of Shirley Williams.
• January 1992: a Volusia County jury convicts Wuornos of the murder of Richard Mallory.
• November 13, 1992: five members of the Coulson family are killed in Houston.
• June 1994: Robert Coulson is convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.
• March 13, 1996: Hamilton kills a teacher and sixteen children at Dunblane Primary School and then himself.
• 1996: Kallinger dies in prison.
• March 23, 1998: Stano is executed in Florida.
• June 25, 2002: Coulson is executed in Texas.
• October 9, 2002: Wuornos is executed in Florida.
• 2020: Albright dies in state custody in Lubbock, Texas.
• May 2024: Berkowitz is refused parole for the twelfth time.
• July 2025: Washington’s sentence review board and California’s parole board decline to release Bianchi.
• September 2025: California opposes Catlin’s petition to the United States Supreme Court.