By Jaime Cannon
Top Ten Serial Killers
by Jaime Cannon
Serial killers’ images, photos and crimes are everywhere these days due to a renewed interest in them, with many television series like Mindhunter (a series based on John Douglas and Robert Ressler, who were two of the world’s premier criminal profilers for the FBI), American Horror Story, a few episodes spoke of and brought serial killers to life, and countless ID Channel shows: A Crime To Remember, See No Evil, and Signs of a Psychopath to name a few. Let’s investigate ten notorious serial killers of all time. (no particular order)
Pedro Lopez, The Monster of the Andes, is one of the world’s most prolific serial killers of all time. He was born in Santa Isabel, Colombia, on October 8th, 1948, and knew darkness from a very early age. His father was murdered before he was born, and he was subjected to abuse and violence from his mother and her constant revolving door of partners. He is linked to more than 300 murders in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. One-third of his victims were tribal women. Lopez was arrested in 1980, and police found multiple graves of more than 50 pre-teenage victims. He confessed to murdering 110 girls in Ecuador and confessed to 240 more in Peru and Colombia. His victims were between the ages of nine to twelve years old, and the preferred method of extinguishing the light in their eyes was strangulation.
Lopez spent less than 20 years in prison and was released in 1998 for good behavior. Pedro was never found….
Harold Shipman, Dr. Death, is believed to have killed at least 218 patients, but the total is closer to 250. Shipman was born in Nottingham, England in 1946. Harold was a very intelligent child and took an early interest in medicine due to his mother receiving morphine while suffering from lung cancer. He received a degree from Leeds University, and a couple of years later, he became a general practitioner.
Dr. Death practiced in London and practiced in two different offices while killing. His preferred method of murder was injecting a lethal dose of the painkiller, Diamorphine. He was only caught due to multiple red flags near the end. An undertaker was surprised at the number of cremation certificates Shipman was submitting, and the certificates notate the cause of death as natural causes. Most of Dr. Death’s victims were elderly women who were found to have died in bed during the day. Shipman continued his killing spree until he got eager and attempted to make a Will for a victim who named him the sole beneficiary. This made the daughter of the deceased question everything.
In 2000, he was convicted on 15 counts of murder, 1 count of forgery, and sentenced to life in prison. Shipman committed suicide in prison by hanging himself.
John Wayne Gacy, Pogo the Clown, was a construction worker, involved in politics, and dressed up as a clown for children’s birthday parties. Nobody knew the monster that existed under that outgoing exterior. Gacy was born on March 17th, 1942, and seemed to have had a normal childhood, but he did exhibit an increasing interest in sadism. He had several encounters with teenage boys and in 1968, he was convicted of sexual assault. Gacy was sent to the Iowa State Men’s Reformatory and required to undergo a psychological evaluation, but the charges were later dropped. After this, Gacy became a moderately successful contractor.
In 1978, after one of Gacy’s victims was reported missing, law enforcement found out that Gacy was the last person to see him. The police obtained a search warrant and found the bodies of 29 boys and young men in or near his home. Four other victims were found in the nearby Des Plaines River. Gacy’s reign of terror lasted from 1972-1978, and his preferred method of murder was strangulation. He had 33 indictments once caught and arrested. He was found guilty in 1980 and died by lethal injection on May 10th, 1994, putting an end to his house of horrors.
H.H. Holmes, The Torture Doctor, born Herman Webster Mudgett, to a very wealthy family in 1861. Mudgett showed a high level of intelligence from an early age. He was always interested in medicine, and often trapped animals and performed surgery on them. Some even say he killed a childhood acquaintance. He attended medical school at the University of Michigan and was an average student. When he graduated, he moved to Chicago and became known as “Dr. H.H. Holmes”. He began killing people to steal their property.
Before the World’s Fair in 1893, Holmes, a career criminal, moved to Chicago and started remodeling a hotel, 3 stories tall, into his castle of misery. The structure contained secret passageways, trapdoors, hallways that led to dead ends, and chutes to the basement. The walls were soundproof, and several mazes led to his victim’s demise. Holmes had gas lines in the murder castle that allowed him to get the upper hand to knock out his victims so he could place them on his surgical table for dissection. Even though he confessed to 27 murders, some of his so-called victims were still alive and living their lives. Holmes was eventually caught, convicted, and sentenced to death. He was only sentenced to death for one murder, that of his business partner, Benjamin Pitezel. Holmes's business partner, Benjamin, came up with an idea to fake his own death to collect insurance money. Holmes had other plans and decided to live his best homicidal life and just kill Benjamin. Rumors were also whispered that Holmes killed three of Benjamin’s children. Unable to keep his mouth shut, he bragged about what he did to another inmate while in jail for a different crime.
In the end, reports say he only built the hotel to lure tourists, kill them, and sell their skeletons to medical schools. He had a history of graverobbing and selling stolen cadavers. Holmes died by hanging in 1896.
Ted Bundy, The Lady Killer, The Campus Killer, terrorized California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and Washington state from 1974-1978. He had 20 confirmed kills, 30 confessed kills, and over 36 suspected kills. Per Ted, he had mastered multiple skills to leave minimal evidence at the crime scenes. Bundy was very organized and had an extensive knowledge of law enforcement techniques that let him outrun and avoid capture for years. His crimes were all over large areas. His victim count had risen to at least 20 before multiple law enforcement agencies realized they were chasing the same man.
Bundy’s murder of choice was blunt force trauma and strangulation. He did not like to use firearms due to the noise and the ballistics left behind. Fingerprints were never found at crime scenes. Ted was a chameleon and could change his appearance quickly. All of Bundy’s known victims were white females, middle-class backgrounds, between the ages of 15 and 25, and were mainly college students. Bundy took photos of many of his victims and once said, “When you work hard and do something right, you don’t want to forget it.” He was eventually captured in 1979 and became America’s most famous serial killer. Bundy defended himself at his trial, but the evidence that included teeth marks on one of his victims was a nail in his coffin. For the next 10 years, he filed multiple appeals to avoid the electric chair. All his appeals failed, he was sentenced to die and eventually confessed to 36 murders. When Bundy was executed in 1989, thousands of people came to the Florida State prison and cheered.
His car, the famous 1968 VW Beetle, is on display at the Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where it sits alongside Gacy’s paintbox and OJ Simpson’s white Ford Bronco.
Rodney Alcala, The Dating Game Killer, had an extensive count of victims. Alcala was called The Dating Game Killer due to appearing on The Dating Game television show in 1978. He was introduced by the host as a successful photographer, had an interest in skydiving and motorcycles. Little did they know, he was a monster and had killed at least 3 women by the time he appeared on the show. Fellow contestants described him as “creepy”, “strange behavior”, and “bizarre”. The person who chose him, Cheryl Bradshaw, did not go on the date, due to him having odd behavior. While on the show, she asked him his favorite time of the day. Alcala said, “The night, the night-time.” Alcala’s crime spree was from 1968-1979, with 8 confirmed victims, with the possibility of up to 130 victims. Alcala was sentenced to death in Orange County in 1980 for the 1979 kidnapping and murder of a 12-year-old girl. That judgment was reversed in 1984 by the California Supreme Court, and Alcala was granted a new trial. In 1986, he was sentenced to death another time for the same 12-year-old girls’ murder; however, a federal appeals court in 2003 overturned the sentence, and he was given a new trial. Years went by, and he was indicted on multiple charges of murder in other states. He had been linked to other murders in Washington state, New York, New Hampshire, and Arizona. Eventually, in December of 2012, he changed his plea to guilty, wanting to return to California to pursue the appeal of his death penalty conviction. The death penalty has not been an option in New York since 2007.
Alcala died of natural causes in 2021 in California. His true number of victims will never be known.
Luis Garavito, The Beast, a Colombian serial killer, had more than 193 victims with 142 convictions. All were boys between the ages of six and sixteen years old. He was a child murderer, torture killer and rapist, from 1992-1999. The Beast murdered street children to satisfy his appetite for killing. Garavito suffered from psychosis, paranoia, depression, and developed an alcohol problem. Even though he did confess to killing 140 boys, one of them did escape. This 9-year-old child was taken to a house nearby, tortured and sexually molested for 12 hours. Garavito sensed someone was near the abandoned home, so he told the child to remain quiet. Due to Luis being drunk, he passed out and the boy managed to escape. Luis was picked up by the police a few days later, on unrelated charge of rape against a 12-year-old. Near the end of his killing spree, he went to western Colombia, became a homeless drifter, and began to feel detached from his crimes. Once arrested, he was held separately from other inmates because it was feared he would kill again.
He was to be eligible for parole in 2023 when he had served three-fifths of his sentence, but in 2021, then President Ivan Duque rejected the possibility of him regaining his freedom and reassured everyone that during his leadership, he would remain in prison.
Jack the Ripper was an English serial killer whose murders happened between August and November 1888. A total of five prostitutes were murdered in or near the Whitechapel district of London’s East End. Jack has never been identified or arrested and remains a mystery to this day. Rumors swirl that Jack was a Russian criminal and/or a teacher interested in surgery. All five of his victims were mutilated, and all but one was killed while approaching potential customers on the street. Each victim’s throat was cut, and the bodies were mutilated in such a manner that the killer had to have knowledge of human anatomy. Over the course of the killings, the police and newspapers received letters on how to catch the killer, but most were hoaxes and useless. However, there were three letters received that claimed to be from the killer himself, but eventually the killings stopped, and total silence.
Jack the Ripper’s killing spree ended due to his possible death, imprisonment, or leaving the area completely.
Robert Hansen, The Butcher Baker had a murderous rampage that lasted from 1971 to 1983 in Alaska, with more than 21 victims killed. Hansen was a quiet person, often described as a loner, and had a difficult relationship with his father. Reports state he started killing around late 1971, early 1972, when he picked up a prostitute in his car and forced her at gunpoint to his home. He then raped her, took her out to a secluded area and began to hunt and track her as if he was hunting deer. Once Hansen successfully tracked her, he then shot and stabbed her. Tracking and hunting women like wild game was something very exciting to him. He is known to have raped and assaulted over thirty Alaskan women, and to have murdered 17 of them, ranging in age from 16-41. Once he was arrested, he was charged with assault, kidnapping, numerous weapons charges, theft, and insurance fraud. He was sentenced to 461 years in prison without the possibility of parole.
Hansen died in 2014, at 75 years old, due to natural causes.
Richard Ramirez, The Night Stalker, spent over two years torturing and raping over 25 victims and killing more than 12 people during 1984-1989. As a young adult, the first crime that he was involved in but did not participate in was the killing of his cousin’s wife. Ramirez was on the scene and did nothing to stop it from happening. This same cousin introduced him to drugs, which resulted in Richard committing small crimes. He also began to worship Satan and became alienated from his parents. By the time he was caught, he had been convicted of 13 murders, 5 attempted murders, 11 sexual assaults, and 14 burglaries. He was sentenced to die in the gas chamber in California in 1989. During his sentencing, he said, “See you in Disneyland.”
Twenty-four years after his sentencing, he had been on death row for more than 23 years. He died in 2013 from B-cell lymphoma at the age of 53.
In closing, this asks the question: Are serial killers born to kill or are they made to kill?
Editor's note: this list ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. Four of the ten entries carry a figure this archive cannot support, and in each case the number quoted is a confession or an estimate rather than a conviction. Rodney Alcala has seven convictions here, not eight confirmed, and the 130 is an upper speculative estimate from the photographs found in his storage locker, most of whose subjects were traced alive. Luis Alfredo Garavito is recorded at 138 convictions rather than 142, with more than 193 confirmed and 221 claimed by him. Robert Hansen pleaded guilty to four murders and confessed to seventeen, with twelve bodies recovered, so the twenty one given here is above even his own account. Ted Bundy is carried at thirty confessed. The list is right where it matters most on H.H. Holmes: he was sentenced to death for one murder, that of Benjamin Pitezel, and it notes that some of the people he confessed to killing turned out to be alive. Pedro Alonso Lopez was convicted of 110 in Ecuador, with 53 bodies recovered.