This list identifies the most notorious serial killer – be it the most famous, prolific, or historical – from every state and the District of Columbia. The United States has produced more serial killers than any other country in the world. Not a statistic to be proud of.
His MO was to abduct local prostitutes, torture them, and then transport them to a cabin in the remote Alaskan wilderness. There, Hansen released them into the wild and hunted them like prey.
Hansen was eventually caught in 1983 when one of his victims escaped. He was later dubbed “The Butcher Baker “ due to his seemingly timid occupation making bread.
Paul John Knowles had a few aliases such as, “The Casanova Killer,” “Lester Daryl Gates,” and “Daryl Golden.” He was an American spree killer. He began his murderous rampage with two anger killings, the result of being dumped by a woman he had seduced while in prison.
All of the women he killed during his 18 to 35 victim rampage through Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas, we’re abducted unwillingly. Knowles was eventually caught in Georgia and shot to death while trying to escape deputies escorting him to a crime scene.
The state-wide community of Texarkana was sent into widespread panic during the spring of 1946, when every three weeks to the day, a seemingly random couple was shot to death in their car. Residents were afraid to go outside at night and stores sold out of guns and ammunition.
Known as the “Texarkana Moonlight Murders,” they inspired the film, “The Town That Dreaded Sundown, “ and remains one of the great unsolved cases in Texas and Arkansas history.
Contrary to popular belief, the killer did not attack during a full moon. He always attacked on the weekend, and always late at night. Throughout the investigations of the Phantom Killer case, almost 400 suspects were arrested.
Kell was a massive 15-year-old with developmental disabilities who began killing in 1945 by dismembering his parents in their small shack, before kidnapping his sister. He murdered 30 people near the town of Wenden, Arizona.
Kell was ultimately brought down by a group of vigilantes and never stood trial. The mourning period was brief and the victims and their alleged killer were all buried and quickly forgotten by the townspeople.
While California has had more than it’s share of high – profile serial killers, the most prolific in state history was Juan Vallejo Corona. In fact, at the time of his conviction in 1971, he was also the most prolific serial killer in the history of the whole country.
Corona supplied migrant workers to agricultural farms near Yuba City in Northern California and housed many of them in bunk houses on his property, which is also where he killed and buried them in shallow graves.
Since California lacked the death penalty in 1971, Corona is currently serving 25 life sentences, one for each victim he was convicted of murdering.
Debate rages about whether or not this is the most prolific serial killer in the history of Colorado. Groves was only convicted of three murders. Advancements in technology have linked him to at least three more deaths, and some say the body count may be as high as 24.
From 1978 to 1988, Grove would meet and strangle women in the Denver area. Some of the women he targeted were prostitutes, but others just happened to be acquaintances of Groves’. He was intelligent and could coax women into compromising situations.
Groves was figured to have been killing two women a month. What’s most alarming about his decade of terror, though, is that he actually spent five years in prison for another murder before being let out to continue his spree.
When Groves was dying, detectives went to talk to him to see whether he would solve the mystery of the fate of many women. He refused. He died in prison in 1996.
After becoming consumed with fantasies of murder shortly after college, this former Cornell graduate and insurance salesman, committed eight killings between 1981 and 1984. He murdered eight girls and women aged between 14 and 25 in Connecticut and New York. He raped seven out of his eight murder victims.
While his MO was to leave his victims’ bodies in a cornfield, he actually entombed the last one in a stone wall. Ross confessed to each of the eight murders and was convicted for the last four of them. He was sentenced to death on July 6, 1987, and spent the next 18 years on death row.
When he was executed in 2005 by the state of Connecticut, it was the first execution in New England since 1960.
Steven Brian Pennell was also known as “The Route 40 Killer,” and “The Corridor Killer.” Most serial killers generally have some sort of traumatic event or psychotic episode in their past that leads them to randomly murder innocent people.
Not Penell, whose psychological examiners described him as “pleasant “ after his arrest. In fact, it was that nice-guy front that he used in 1997 and 1998 to abduct female hitchhikers along a stretch of Route 40 near Wilmington, before torturing, mutilating, and beating them to death.
The 31-year-old father of two was convicted of two murders and died from lethal injection in 1992. He was the state’s first, and to date, only confirmed serial killer.
Although a number of serial killers have taken lives in the nation’s capital, the most notable to act entirely inside the District was the still-at-large “Freeway Phantom .” In 1971 and 1972, this killer kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and strangled six girls.
The victims were all African – American girls between the ages of 10 and 18. The bodies were left near freeway on/off ramps and, despite the fact he left a note on one if the victims, he has never been caught.
Ultimately, no investigative lead produced sufficient evidence for prosecution. However, interest in these serial killings has never faded, and the case is open as a cold case in the Metropolitan Police Department Homicide Division.
The most famous of the many serial killers who’ve called Florida home. Bundy, who had been described as a charming young man, kidnapped, tortured, and murdered young women. Some of who he abducted in the same day and location, within a few hours of one another.
All of Bundy’s known victims were white females, most of middle – class backgrounds. Almost all were between the ages of 15 and 25 and most were college students. It was speculated that Bundy’s animosity toward his first girlfriend triggered his protracted rampage and caused him to target victims who resembled her.
He did concede that youth and beauty were “absolutely indispensable criteria” in his choice of victims. Bundy escaped from prison twice before being apprehended in Florida in 1978, and while he's believed to have possibly murdered as many as 100 people. He died in the electric chair at Railford Prison in 1989.
Wayne Williams officially only killed two people, both adult men in 1981. While in prison, however, he was linked to the Atlanta Child Murders, a series of 28 random killings that petrified Atlanta parents between July 1979 and March 1981.
While authorities never legally connected Williams to any of the children’s deaths. He is generally regarded as the culprit and remains in prison today. Williams maintained his innocence from the beginning, and claimed that Atlanta officials covered up evidence of Ku Klux Klan involvement in the killings to avoid a race war in the city.
On a remote island state where people go to escape whatever they’ve done on the mainland, it’s a surprise only one real serial killer of notoriety has emerged. In 1985 and 1986, five women were found bound, sexually assaulted, and strangled around Honolulu.
An “informant” who led police to one of the bodies and had no alibi was arrested and picked out of a line-up, as having been seen with one of the victims the night she died. But he was released after passing a polygraph test.
A $25,000 reward for information was put out by private businesses. The reward went unclaimed, It is believed the suspect died after moving to the mainland, and the case went cold.
If Lyda Southard wasn’t a complete sociopath, she was definitely the saddest, unluckiest woman to ever grace the Northern Rocky Mountains. Somehow, her first four husbands managed to die of “the flu,” as did one of her brothers-in-law and one of her children.
Since forensics in the 1910s and 1920s wasn’t quite what it is today, authorities were inclined to believe her stories. Except for a chemist named Earl Dooley, who later discovered that Southard’s first husband and his brother died of arsenic poisoning and that Lyda had received over $7,000 in life insurance from her four dead husbands.
She was arrested in Honolulu for the murder of her first husband, probably saving the life of husband number five with whom she was living. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison, escaped, was re-apprehended, and was ultimately pardoned in 1942. By the end, Lady Southard was married a total of seven times.
The “Killer Clown” is definitely one of the most notorious murderers of the American 20th century. Convicted of sodomy in Iowa, Gacy was released on parole and began a construction company near Chicago in the early 1970s.
It was from the company’s labor force that he found his victims, luring at least 33 young boys and men to his home where he strangled them to death before hiding 26 of the bodies in the crawl space under the house.
Three further victims were buried elsewhere on his property, while the bodies of his last four known victims were discarded in the Des Plaines River. Gacy was convicted of 33 murders and was sentenced to death for 12 of these killings.
Gacy spent 14 years on death row before he was executed by lethal injection at Statesville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994.
Convicted of the 1984 murder and dismemberment of a 15-year-old boy, Indiana-born Eyler may have strangled and stabbed as many as 23 men across four states in the early 1980s. Sentenced to death, Eyler ended up dying in prison from complications related to Aids in 1994.
After Eyler’s death, his defense attorney revealed the names of 17 males whom Eyler had confessed to murdering and four whom he said were murdered by an unidentified accomplice. That person was later revealed to be Robert David Little, an older college professor and longtime associate. Eyler had made the list of victims around three years before his death, in an effort to obtain a plea bargain.
On the night of June 9, 1912, someone snuck into a Victorian farmhouse belonging to Josiah and Sarah Moore near Villisca, Iowa. By morning, both parents, as well as their four children and two overnight house guests, had been beaten to death with an axe.
A traveling minister named George Kelly was arrested and twice tried for the murders, but never convicted. The first trial ended in a hung jury, while the second trial ended in an acquittal. Other suspects in the investigation were also exonerated. The house is now a haunted tourist attraction and the crime will, no doubt, remain unsolved forever.
Dennis Rader’s murderous life began with the 1974 killing of the Otero family in Wichita, after which he sent letters to local media outlets demanding attention and forcing them to give him a nickname -- BTK (Blind, Torture, Kill – what he did to his victims).
After eventually gaining the notoriety he sought, he took a break from murder for the better part of the 1980s and 1990s. Then announcing his return in 2004 with a letter to the Wichita Eagle that confessed to a 1986 killing.
His newfound hunger for media attention eventually led to his capture in 2005. He is now serving life without parole.
Kentucky : Donald Harvey
During his career at the Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky he would poison patients, who angered him, with arsenic, cyanide, and occasionally hepatitis and HIV viruses. Known as the “Angel of Death,” because he always seemed to be around when a patient died.
Harvey also poisoned two of his neighbors, killing one. He claimed to have murdered 87 people. The official estimates of the number of people he murdered range anywhere from at least 37 to 57 deaths. Harvey is currently serving 28 life sentences at the Southern Corrections Facility and is up for parole in 2043.
This young lady personally axed at least 17 people to death as part of the Church of the Sacrifice, a group convinced that the key to riches and immortality was sacrificing other people. Along with Branabet, the organization claims to have killed more than 40 people in the early 1910s, a sort of weird southern precursor to the Manson Family.
Though his crimes were committed mostly in New York state, Shawcross was a native of Maine, a state seriously devoid of homicidal maniacs. In 1972, however, Shawcross murdered two children but was able to plead down to manslaughter in exchange for both confessing and discussing the location of bodies.
In one of the greatest cases of justice system ineptitude, he was released from prison in 1987 after serving half his sentence. Not surprisingly, he returned to murder and killed a dozen adult females between 1988 and 1989 before finally being arrested in early 1990. He received 250 years in prison, was not released this time, and died there in 2008.
Maryland’s nastiest serial killer kept a collection of violent pornography and autopsy photos in a cinder-block shack near Annapolis to help fuel his rage. One evening he ran a soldier off the side of the road and murdered his girlfriend. After the soldier fled, he assaulted the corpse.
A few years later, he abducted and murdered a family of four near Fredericksburg, Virginia, burying two of the bodies in a ditch and leaving the others in the woods. Prior to his arrest and imprisonment, Rees was known as a Jazz musician in the Washington, DC area.
Rees was convicted by the state of Maryland of Margaret Harold’s murder and sentenced to life in prison. Virginia added a death sentence for the other four murders, though it was eventually changed to life in 1972. Melvin Rees died in prison in 1995.
From June 1962 to January 1964, a man wheeled his way into the domiciles of 13 different women, where he assaulted and strangled them. The women aged in range from 19 to 85 and there were no signs of forced entry into any of their apartments.
While serial rapist Albert DE Salvo later confessed to being the Boston Strangler, there were inconsistencies in his confessions and, as recently as 2013, DNA evidence ruled him out in several of the cases.
Parties investigating the crimes have suggested that the murders, sometimes referred as “The Silk Stocking Murders,” were committed by more than one person. The case remains officially unsolved.
While not all of Carl Watts’ 1974 to 1980 killings happened on a Sunday, the nickname, “Sunday Morning Slasher, “ emerged after a series of morning stabbings in Ann Arbor that did. He would simply knock on doors and stab to death whoever answered.
He used similar methods to kill women across Michigan, Texas, and Ontario, and he is believed to have murdered more than 80 people in total. Watts killed females between the ages of 14 and 44 using methods such as strangulation, stabbing, bludgeoning, and drowning.
Watts murdered dozens of women between 1974 and 1982, and despite the many women he murdered, he was not discovered as a serial killer for almost eight years. He was ultimately convicted of only two murders, but was sentenced to life in prison in Michigan, and died of prostate cancer in 2007.
Recently the subject of a major controversy when DNA from another man was found at one of his crime scenes, “Butcher Knife Billy” remains the most notorious serial killer in Minnesota history. In 1986 and 1987, Glaze abducted three prostitutes, beat them to death, and left their bodies on display.
On occasion, Glaze has claimed to have killed upward of 20 women, but at other times has maintained his innocence. Glaze was suspected of the murders of at least 50 women in multiple states. In spite of testing dozens of pieces of evidence from the three crime scenes, none came back as a match to Glaze.
Glaze was convicted of three counts of first degree murder. Glaze died on December 22, 2015, aged 72, shortly after being diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. He died in prison after spending more than 25 years incarcerated.
Rogers was dubbed “The Cross Country Killer “ and murdered at least five people in California, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. His MO from 1994 to 1995, aside from one victim who was a retired electrician, involved meeting red-headed women over for drinks and then eventually stabbing them to death.
Such was the fate of Linda Price who met Rogers at the Mississippi State Fair and shortly after Halloween, was found in her bathtub. Rogers was apprehended after a murder in Florida, where he currently sits on death row.
Charles Hatcher was arrested 14 times under three different names for everything from auto theft, to passing bad checks, to murder. Hatcher killed at least 16 people in Missouri and California, as well as murdered a fellow inmate in 1961.
Hatcher was diagnosed with several mental illnesses including a passive-aggressive personality with pedophilia and paraphilia, insane , a mentally disordered sexual offender, and paranoid schizophrenia.
Despite eluding capture for years, he was eventually apprehended and requested a death sentence but the jury refused, recommending a life sentence on December 3, 1984. Four days later, Hatcher hanged himself in his cell at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City.
Until the late 1960s, the concept of serial killer profiling wasn’t common, but David Meirhofer was the first person caught using profiling. Between 1967 and 1974, Meirhofer kidnapped and killed three children and an ex-girlfriend.
The technique led investigators to suspect that the suspect was a young, white male who killed for sexual gratification and may have kept body parts of victims as “souvenirs.“ Furthermore, they believed that the killer may have been arrested for other crimes.
After a call to one of his victim’s mother a year after her child’s abduction, the FBI tracked him down. He was arrested, confessed to the murders, and then promptly hanged himself four hours later in his jail cell.
In the fall of 1982, two boys in rural Nebraska were found stabbed to death. After a witness said he saw a white man in a tan car approach one of the boys, an APB went out that was eventually traced back to an Air Force radar technician named John Joubert.
Joubert confessed to killing the two boys, and on January 12, 1984, he was charged with their murders. A panel of three judges sentenced him to death for both counts. He was later linked to a similar murder in Maine, as well as three other unrelated murders.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment in Maine for the murder he was linked to. Further investigation in Maine revealed two crimes. Joubert had slashed a nine-year-old boy and a male teacher in his mid-20s. Danny Joe Eberle was the boy who disappeared while delivering newspapers. His body was found the next day.
Joubert would later describe how he approached Eberle, drew a knife, and covered the boy’s mouth with his hand. He drove him to a gravel road outside the town. Eberle had been stripped to his underwear, his feet and hands had been bound, and his mouth had been taped with surgical tape. Joubert had stabbed him nine times.
A hopeless alcoholic, Cole killed several women around the San Diego area before marrying and killing Diana Pashal. As she was also an alcoholic, police incorrectly assumed she’d died from alcohol poisoning when they found her body wrapped in a blanket in Cole’s closet.
Cole split town for Las Vegas, where he killed several other women before landing in Dallas. There, police eventually found him on the scene of one of his own murders and promptly determined the victim had died of natural causes.
Cole bailed them out, however, and confessed not only to that murder but to several others as well. After serving time in Texas, he confessed to even more murders in Nevada, and he was ultimately executed there in 1985.
A race car driver with an Australian accent. Wilder became known as the “Beauty Queen Killer” because of his penchant for attractive victims. His first was a promo model he met at the Miami Grand Prix in 1984, and her death marked the beginning of a cross-country murder rampage.
Beginning in Florida, Wilder kidnapped and killed eight or nine women, among them a former Miss Florida contestant , a competitor at a Seventeen Magazine cover model competition, and an FSU coed. After finding himself on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitive List, he fled to Canada, but before he made it, two state troopers noticed him at a gas station in New Hampshire and he was shot in a scuffle.
Cottingham’s typical MO involved kidnapping, killing, and sometimes dismembering young women. He often left only the torso, hence the gruesome nickname, “Torso Killer.” His spree lasted from 1967 to 1980 throughout New York and New Jersey. He was ultimately apprehended when hotel workers heard a victim’s screams and called the police.
When arrested he had handcuffs, a leather gag, two slave collars, a switchblade, replica pistols and a stockpile of prescription pills. At his house he had a trophy room where he kept personal effects from some of his victims. He was convicted of five murders, but claims over 100 victims, and was sentenced to 173 to 197 years in prison.
Though not even close to the most prolific killer in New York history, the “Son of Sam” is easily the most notorious. From the summer of 1976 to the summer of 1977, the city lived in fear as a mysterious man stalked and shot several couples, killing seven people and wounding eight.
He left notes for police that referred to himself as the “Son of Sam,” a reference to his neighbor who owned a dog that Berkowitz believed gave him demonic orders to kill. His taunts to police and letters to the media brought him celebrity status.
After his arrest and conviction, New York passed “Son of Sam” laws banning criminals from profiting from their crimes. He is currently serving life in Attica.
Charles Kennedy essentially ran the Bates Motel of the 1860s. A small guesthouse near Eagle Nest, New Mexico. Here he would offer weary travelers on the road to Taos, a place to eat dinner and sleep, before he killed them. And since this was New Mexico in the 1860s, nobody seemed to notice.
When travelers stopped for a bed and a meal, Charles killed them, stole their valuables, and either burned or buried their bodies. Eventually Kennedy’s wife escaped and told local authorities about his crimes, and he was arrested.
Before he could stand trial, however, Kennedy was snatched from the jail by an angry mob. They threw a rope around his neck and dragged him by a horse up and down Main street until long after he was dead. His body was not allowed, by the townspeople, to be buried in the Catholic cemetery and was interred outside the cemetery boundaries.
Charlotte’s worst serial killer targeted people he knew, as in, knew so well he actually attended the funeral of one and filled a missing person’s report for another. Wallace was arrested on March 13, 1994. For 12 hours, he confessed to the murders of 10 women in Charlotte.
He described in detail, the women’s appearances, how he raped, robbed, and killed the women, and his crack habit. On January 7, 1997, Wallace was found guilty of nine murders. On January 29, he was sentenced to nine death sentences. He currently awaits execution in Raleigh’s Central Prison. No execution date has been set for Wallace.
Though most if his crimes were committed in Minnesota and Washington, Harvey Carignan’s miserable life started in Fargo. His first confirmed murder was in 1949 in Alaska, a crime for which he was committed and sentenced to death.
The sentence was overturned, however, thanks to a coerced confession. After being released, he went on to abduct and kill at least five more women Carignan was also arrested for several other sexual assaults.
His actual conviction was for attempted murder and aggravated sodomy in Minnesota. He is currently serving the remainder of a 400-year sentence at the Minnesota Correctional Facility – Fairbault, for the murders of two women.
This murderer killed at least 12 vagrants and drifters between 1935 and 1938, many of whom lived in shanty towns and whose disappearances weren’t noticed. The victims were nearly all decapitated, dismembered, and in some cases even castrated.
In many cases the cause of death was the decapitation itself. Some of the victims showed evidence of chemical treatment being applied to their bodies. Many of the victims were found after a considerable period of time following their deaths, sometimes a year or more.
This made identification nearly impossible, especially since the heads were often not found. The official number of murders credited to the “Cleveland Torso Murderer” is twelve, although recent research has show there are as many as twenty.
The killer was never identified or apprehended, despite the fact that Cleveland’s Director of Public Safety at the time was none other than Elliot Ness.
Families are hard to deal with, even for the most well adjusted of people. Nannie Doss, however, found a simple solution -- she just killed relatives she didn’t like. Her 11 victims included four husbands, two sisters, a mother-in-law, a grandson, and her own mother.
Typically using rat poison and arsenic, the “Giggling Granny” killed relatives with whom she disagreed. Her last victim was her husband Samuel Doss, whose life she ended with a poisoned “welcome home “ meal after he was released from the hospital.
The state of Oklahoma centered it’s case only on Samuel Doss. Nannie pleaded guilty on May 17, 1955 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. The state did not peruse the death penalty due to her gender. Doss was never charged with the other deaths. She died of leukemia in the hospital ward of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in 1965.
Also known as “The I-5 Bandit,’” Randall Woodfield also became known as “The I-5 Killer when he murdered a woman in a Salem office building. Despite a history of indecent exposure, he was drafted as a wide receiver out of Portland State by the Green Bay Packers in 1974.
He didn’t last long in the league and was cut by coach Dan Devine during training camp. With no source of income, Woodfield took to robbing and assaulting women at knife point. Using fake beards to hide his identity, he assaulted and killed what some claim to be 44 people before being apprehended.
Woodfield was convicted of those crimes in 1975, released on parole in 1979, and immediately began robbing businesses along I-5 in Oregon and Washington. His life became a popular book by Ann Rule. He is currently in prison in Salem.
From November 1986 to January 1987, Heidnik kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured – including starvation and execution – five people in the basement of his Philadelphia home. While only two of his victims died, his crimes are still among the most horrific in Pennsylvania.
Heidnik actually dismembered one victim and boiled her head, which caused a smell so pungent that neighbors called the police. The police left the scene after Heidnik convinced them that it was just a bad pot roast. He was executed in July of 1999.
Craig Price was also known as the “Warwick Slasher,” and while many serial killers get their start as kids by killing the neighbor’s cat, he went straight to murdering people. At age 13, he broke into a house and stabbed the woman who lived there 58 times.
Two years later, in a Marijuana and acid induced haze, he stabbed another neighbor 57 times while also killing her 10-year-old daughter , Jennifer 62 times and crushed the skull of her 8-year-old daughter, Melissa. Their wounds were so deep that the knives actually broke off the handles into the bodies of the victims.
Though he confessed, he also bragged that since he was a juvenile when he committed the heinous acts, he’d “make history” upon being released at 21. Rhode Island, however, had the last word. Not only did it change the law but it found other crimes for which to charge Price.
Price remains in prison serving 10 to 25 years for Criminal Intent and in-prison violence. Price was denied parole in March 2009 and his current release date is in May – 2020.
This guy was not only known as a Hitman in South Carolina in the late sixties and early seventies, but also killed for pure enjoyment. Gaskins clarified his killings into two categories: “Coastal kills” - mostly killing hitchhikers he picked up about every 6 weeks and tortured / cannibalized and “serious kills” – people who he knew, or pissed him off, or he was paid to kill.
He was finally caught when a fellow criminal ratted him out. Gaskins was tried on eight charges of murder on May 24th 1976, found guilty on May 28th, and sentenced to death which was later commuted to life in prison.
While incarcerated Gaskins killed a death row inmate. Gaskins was tried for the murder and sentenced to death. While on death row he confessed to having committed between 100 and 110 murders. He was sentenced to death in 1976 and was executed by electric chair in 1991.
A transient, Depression-era laborer, Bird moved across the country doing railroad work, and in addition to robbing to support himself, also killed everywhere he went. This included South Dakota and among 10 other states where he murdered an estimated 44 Women.
When he was finally convicted after killing a woman during a Tacoma Washington break-in he made a statement before sentencing, “ I’m putting the Jake Bird hex on all of you who had anything to do with my being punished.” “ Mark my words you will die before I do.”
And within a year, six of the people involved in his trial, did in fact, perish, including the judge. Bird himself died at Walla Walla by hanging in 1949.
Since forensic science in the 1700s wasn’t exactly what it is now, it’s hard to confirm these guys were actually America’s first serial killers but folklore gives them the nefarious claim. A pair of brothers who roamed Tennessee, Kentucky, and Illinois, they killed indiscriminately often filling the bodies with rocks and dumping them in a river.
They butchered anyone at the slightest provocation even babies. The Harpes are credited with having confessed and confirmed to killing 39 people and an estimated, combined total, including unknown murders, of more than 50 victims.
Micajah, the elder or “Big” Harpe, was allegedly killed and his head was stuck on a post somewhere near Harpes Head intersection in Webster County, Kentucky, while the younger, “Little” Harpe was apprehended and executed by hanging in 1804.
Dean Corll was the owner of a Texas candy company who cruised around for victims, mostly teenagers, in an Ecoline van. His spree ended when one of his accomplices fatally shot him in the chest and provided authorities with the gruesome details of almost 30 murders.
He abducted, raped, tortured, and murdered, a minimum of 28 boys in a series of killings spanning from 1970 to 1973 in Houston, Texas. At the time of their discovery, the Houston Mass Murders were considered the worst example of Serial murder in American history.
Corll was known to have retained keepsakes from his victims. To date 27 of Corll’s known victims have been identified, and the identity of a 28th victim, whose body has never been found, is conclusively known. All of these victims had been killed by either shooting, strangulation, or a combination of both.
Silveria’s killings were done in Utah in a dramatic fashion. He spent 1981 – 1996 riding the nation’s freight trains as part of the criminal Brotherhood Freight Train Riders of America. This was a criminal underworld Brotherhood. He was also known as “Sidetrack Bob.”
His 28 victims, mostly fellow transients, met their fate in many states, but Utah was chief among them. Silverio was arrested in March 1996, and had confessed to murdering the 28 people. He is currently serving out his life sentences in Wyoming.
This still- unsolved case spans two states, Vermont and New Hampshire, and started with the bodies of three women, one of them a University of Vermont Student, turned up near Kelleyville New Hampshire. All three women had been stabbed to death.
More mysterious stabbings occurred in both States between 1985 and 1987, but the killings stopped for good in 1988 after one of the victims survived, although she unfortunately couldn’t identify him. Credited with at least seven deaths, the killer is still at large.
Virginia’s Colonial Parkway is kind of a cool idea. It’s a road connecting Williamsburg, Jamestown, and Yorktown, that’s designed to keep tourists in the colonial mood by banning modern development. The lack of development, however, also lent itself well to a serial killer.
Four couples either died or went missing between 1986 and 1989. Their cars or bodies were found on or near the historic road. No arrests were ever made in the case, but nobody has died there since 1989. As of Spring 2016, the killer or killers have not yet been identified.
Investigators have speculated that the suspect might be a law enforcement officer, a National Park Service Ranger, or someone impersonating one. Other investigators believe the killings were committed by more than one person working as a team.
Also known as the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway, is the most prolific serial killer in American history who killed nearly 100 women between 1982 and 1989. Utah native Gary Ridgway was the focus of the nation’s largest and longest Manhunt.
Along a stretch of Washington Route 99 south of Seattle, he would pick up and strangle prostitutes or runaways, and then pose their dead, nude, bodies near the Green River. Adept at avoiding detection, authorities finally consulted Ted Bundy, who has also killed in and around Seattle, to help with the profiling.
Ridgeway was actually arrested several times for the murders, but the evidence never stuck, and it wasn’t until an improvement in DNA analysis that he was arrested for good in 2001. Convicted of only 49 of his believed 90 +, he is currently serving 48 life sentences + 480 years at Walla Walla.
Probably best known as the guy who shot Larry Flynt, his actual murders are far more disturbing than that attempted one, largely because they were racially motivated. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Franklin killed two young women in West Virginia after one admitted to having an African- American boyfriend, as well as a number of other victims in Utah and Ohio.
He also attempted to kill civil rights activists, Vernon Jordan Jr., a crime he was acquitted of but later confessed to. He was convicted of several murders, and was given six life sentences, as well as the death sentence. He was executed in 2013, despite a plea for clemency from Larry Flynt.
He is also known as the “Happy Face Killer.” After someone else confessed to his first murder in 1990, Jefferson drew a happy face alongside a confession of his own on a bathroom wall so that the media would give proper credit where it was due.
When he didn’t get the Press he thought, he began sending “happy face” letters to the media and law enforcement officials daring them to find him. Between 1990 and 1995, he claims to have killed over 160 women, mostly prostitutes, in six Western States, including Wyoming.
While only eight are confirmed, it was the murder of his longtime girlfriend in March, 1995, that ultimately led to his arrest. He is currently serving three consecutive life sentences in Oregon.
Jeffrey Dahmer is so ingrained in pop culture that he’s even mentioned in a Ke$ha song. The perpetrator of some of the most morbid macabre crimes in US history, Dahmer lured men to his apartment where he would kill, dismember and eat them. He was convicted of 17 counts of murder and received 17 life sentences. None of which lasted very long as he was beaten to death by a fellow inmate in 1994.
So here’s a list of 50 plus killers, including accomplices, and that’s not even making a dent in the total number of crazies. So basically if you thought you might be in a safe state you thought wrong. And I guess that also means, as potential victims, there’s no place to hide.
All of our Serial Killer Magazines and books are massive, perfect bound editions. These are not the kind of flimsy magazines or tiny paperback novels that you are accustomed to. These are more like giant, professionally produced graphic novels.
We are happy to say that the Serial Killer Trading Cards are back! This 90 card set features the artwork of 15 noted true crime artists and will come with a numbered, signed certificate of authenticity for each set. get yours now before they are gone forever.
SERIAL KILLER MAGAZINE is an official release of the talented artists and writers at SerialKillerCalendar.com. It is chock full of artwork, rare documents, FBI files and in depth articles regarding serial murder. It is also packed with unusual trivia, exclusive interviews with the both killers and experts in the field and more information that any other resource available to date. Although the magazine takes this subject very seriously and in no way attempts to glorify the crimes describe in it, it also provides a unique collection of rare treats (including mini biographical comics, crossword puzzles and trivia quizzes). This is truly a one of a kind collectors item for anyone interested in the macabre world of true crime, prison art or the strange world of murderabelia.
All of our Serial Killer books are massive, 8.5" x 11" perfect bound editions. These are not the kind of tiny paperback novels that you are accustomed to. These are more like giant, professionally produced graphic novels.
We are now looking for artists, writers and interviewers to take part in the world famous Serial Killer Magazine. If you are interested in joining our team, contact us at MADHATTERDESIGN@GMAIL.COM
