This list names one serial killer, or one unsolved series, for each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia. The pick for each state is the case most closely tied to it: the killings happened there, the investigation ran there, and the case is the one people in that state remember. A killer who was only born in a state, or who was caught or executed there for killings committed elsewhere, does not count for that state.
We use the FBI’s working definition of serial murder: the killing of two or more people in separate events by the same offender. Each entry says what is proven and what is only confessed or suspected, and gives the person’s status as of October 2026 where it could be confirmed.
This version replaces an older list that had no sources and many errors. Nineteen of the old picks were replaced, for reasons given in the notes: some were not serial killers, some had no real tie to the state, and one, the Arizona entry, describes a case we could not find in any record at all. One state, Iowa, has no case that fits, and its entry says so.
Jack Harrison Trawick killed women in and around Birmingham, Alabama, over two decades. In 1972 he killed Betty Jo Richards, a 17-year-old runaway from Quinton. In 1990 he was paroled from St. Clair Correctional Facility after serving seven years for burglary. In June 1992 he stabbed Aileen Pruitt, 26, to death, and on October 9, 1992, he abducted and killed Stephanie Gach, a 21-year-old Jefferson State College student. Police arrested Trawick on a parole violation, and he confessed to the Gach killing, then to the Pruitt and Richards killings. He also claimed to have killed two more women in the Pacific Northwest in the late 1970s, but police in Seattle and Ashland, Oregon, said they knew of no matching cases. That gives three confessed Alabama killings, two convictions, and two unconfirmed claims. He was sentenced to death for Gach’s murder and to life without parole for Pruitt’s. From death row, his drawings and writings about his crimes were posted online, and he used them to taunt Gach’s mother. Alabama executed Trawick by lethal injection on June 11, 2009. He was 62 and apologized in his final words. [1] [2] [3]
Robert Hansen owned a bakery in an Anchorage strip mall. Over roughly a dozen years in the 1970s and early 1980s, he lured topless dancers and sex workers with offers of money, abducted them at gunpoint, and flew them to remote areas to kill them. One victim, found outside Eagle River in 1980, is still known only as “Eklutna Annie”; Hansen said he never learned her name. In 1983 a teenager, Cindy Paulson, escaped from his home and ran in handcuffs into a Fifth Avenue motel, telling police he had held and raped her and planned to fly her out to be killed. Months later, searches of his home produced enough evidence to charge him with four murders. In February 1984 Hansen pleaded guilty to those four killings and was sentenced to 461 years. As part of the deal he confessed to 17 murders and about 30 rapes and helped locate graves, though only about a dozen bodies were found. State trooper Glenn Flothe was central to his capture. Hansen died at Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage on August 21, 2014, at age 75, after a year of declining health. [4] [5]
Between August 6, 2005, and June 29, 2006, a gunman carried out a series of attacks across Phoenix, many near Baseline Road. Robberies and sexual assaults escalated to murder. Nine people were killed, eight women and one man, all shot in the head while going about ordinary routines such as leaving work, washing a car, waiting at a bus stop, or cooking in a food truck. Police arrested Mark Goudeau on September 6, 2006, first for the 2005 gunpoint sexual assault of two sisters in a south Phoenix park. A Y-chromosome DNA test helped identify him, and ballistics tied a murder police had first overlooked to the other eight. In January 2007 he was convicted in the sisters’ case and sentenced to 438 years. In 2011 a second jury convicted him of 67 counts, including all nine murders, and on November 30, 2011, he received nine death sentences. The Arizona Supreme Court upheld the convictions in 2016. Goudeau maintains his innocence. As of April 2026 reporting, he remained on Arizona’s death row while a post-conviction petition, filed in February 2026, alleged police misconduct and intellectual disability. [6] [7] [8]
In the spring of 1946, an unidentified attacker targeted people around Texarkana, the city that straddles the Arkansas and Texas line. On February 22, Jimmy Hollis and Mary Jeanne Larey were attacked on a secluded road in Bowie County, Texas; both survived. On March 24, Richard Griffin and Polly Ann Moore were found shot in the back of the head on a back road. On April 14, Paul Martin and Betty Jo Booker were found dead in Spring Lake Park. On May 3 the attacker struck in Miller County, Arkansas, shooting Virgil Starks dead at his farmhouse and wounding his wife, Katy, who escaped to a neighbor’s home. Five people were killed and three wounded. The press called them the Moonlight Murders because the first two came about a week after a full moon. Texas Ranger Manuel “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullas joined the investigation. The main suspect, Youell Swinney, a repeat offender, was jailed for life in 1947 for car theft but never charged with the killings: a woman who implicated him changed her account and could not be compelled to testify. No one was ever convicted, and the case remains unsolved. [9]
Juan Corona was a labor contractor who supplied crews to farms near Yuba City in Sutter County. In 1971 the bodies of 25 itinerant farm laborers were found in shallow graves on farms and orchards along the Feather River. Most had been stabbed and hacked, some were dismembered, and one had been shot in the head. The case began when a peach farmer who used Corona’s crews found a freshly dug and refilled hole and reported it. After nine more bodies were recovered from another orchard, Corona was arrested; investigators found a machete, an axe, a meat cleaver and a ledger of laborers’ names in his truck and home. He was convicted at his first trial, but an appeals court overturned the verdict in 1978, citing incompetent representation. At a retrial in Alameda County, where his new lawyer argued that Corona’s brother was the killer, he was again convicted of all 25 murders and sentenced to life. Fourteen of the victims, four never identified, are buried in a common grave in Sutter. Corona was denied parole eight times, the last in 2016. He died on March 4, 2019, at age 85, while serving his sentence at California State Prison, Corcoran. [10]
Vincent Darrell Groves targeted vulnerable women in the Denver area from 1978 to 1988, according to the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office. He was convicted of murder in 1982 and served less than five years in prison before his release. He was later convicted of killing a woman in Douglas County and of another killing in a neighboring county, for three murder convictions in all. Investigators believe he was responsible for at least a dozen homicides, as well as an attempted murder and a sexual assault, and say the total may be higher. Groves died in prison in 1996. DNA work has since tied him to older cases. In December 2025 the sheriff’s office announced that DNA recovered from paper bags placed over the hands of Rhonda Marie Fisher, 30, had identified Groves as her killer. Fisher was last seen walking on a Denver street, and her body was found on April 1, 1987, off a highway embankment near Sedalia, about 25 miles away. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. A 2017 test had failed to identify a suspect, and her parents and brother died before the case was solved. [11]
Michael Bruce Ross, a Cornell graduate who later worked as an insurance agent, raped and killed young women and girls in New York and Connecticut between 1981 and 1984. His first known victim was Dzung Ngoc Tu, 25, a student killed in Ithaca, New York, in May 1981. Eight women and girls died in all, six of them in eastern Connecticut, among them Leslie Shelley and April Brunais, both 14, who were killed in Griswold in April 1984. In June 1984 a witness reported seeing a blue car near where Wendy Baribeault, 17, was killed in Lisbon. Ross was arrested, confessed, and led police to the bodies of other victims. He pleaded guilty in 1985 to two Connecticut murders and in 1987 was sentenced to death for four others; he admitted to the New York killings but was not tried for them. In 2004 he dropped his remaining appeals, saying the families had suffered enough. Judges found him competent despite challenges from his family and death penalty opponents. Ross was executed by lethal injection at Osborn Correctional Institution in Somers on May 13, 2005, at age 45. It was New England’s first execution in 45 years. [12] [13]
Steven Brian Pennell, a married electrician with children, targeted women working as prostitutes along Route 40 in New Castle County in 1987 and 1988. Shirley Ellis, 23, was found at a construction site off Route 40 on November 29, 1987. Catherine DiMauro, 31, a divorced mother of two, was found at another Route 40 construction site on June 29, 1988. Michelle Gordon, 22, was later found in a canal, and Kathleen Meyer, 26, was last seen getting into a blue Ford van; her body was never found. New Castle County police officer Renee Taschner went undercover on Route 40, and when Pennell picked her up she collected blue carpet fibers from his van that matched fibers on victims. Searches turned up hair, blood and skin from some of the women. On Thanksgiving Day 1989 a jury convicted him of murdering Ellis and DiMauro but did not convict him of killing Gordon. He later pleaded no contest to the Gordon and Meyer killings without admitting guilt. He was suspected but never charged in the death of Margaret Finner, 27. Pennell asked for a death sentence and was executed by lethal injection on March 14, 1992. [14] [15]
Between April 1971 and September 1972, six Black girls and young women, aged 10 to 18, were abducted in Washington and later found dead, several of them near highways. Carol Denise Spinks, 13, disappeared on April 25, 1971, after being sent to a 7-Eleven; her body was found near the interstate on May 1. Darlenia Denise Johnson, 16, disappeared on her way to a summer job in July. Brenda Crockett, 10, Nenomoshia Yates, 12, Brenda Denise Woodard, 18, and Diane Williams, 17, were also killed. Five were sexually assaulted and strangled; Williams was strangled. Woodard, whose body was found in Maryland in November 1971, had also been stabbed, and a note left with her was signed “Free-Way Phantom.” Retired DC police Sgt. Louis Richardson believed members of the “Green Vega” gang, convicted in other sexual assaults, were responsible, but no one has been charged. Much of the evidence has been lost or destroyed. The Metropolitan Police Department’s Major Case/Cold Case Unit and the Prince George’s County Police Homicide Unit still ask the public for information. The case remains unsolved. [16] [17]
Aileen Wuornos shot and killed seven men near highways in north and central Florida in 1989 and 1990. Her first victim, Richard Mallory, 51, a repair shop owner, was last seen on November 30, 1989; his body was found on December 13. Police arrested Wuornos on January 9, 1991, at The Last Resort bar in Port Orange on an outstanding charge. Investigators then found her former partner, Tyria Moore, in Pennsylvania, and Moore agreed to help them. Wuornos confessed in a phone call with Moore and then in a videotaped police interview. On January 27, 1992, a jury convicted her of first-degree murder and robbery in Mallory’s death. She later entered pleas in five more killings and received six death sentences in all. She was never charged in the death of the seventh man, Peter Siems. Florida executed Wuornos by lethal injection in Starke on October 9, 2002. She was 46. [18]
From September 1977 to April 1978, nine attacks on older women in Columbus, Georgia, many in the Wynnton neighborhood, left seven dead and two injured. The women, aged 59 to 89, were beaten, raped and choked, often with stockings, and the press called the attacker the “Stocking Strangler.” In May 1984 police arrested Carlton Gary after a pistol stolen in a 1977 Wynnton-area burglary was traced to him. According to the Georgia Attorney General’s Office, he said he had been present at or knew of eight of the nine crimes, and his fingerprints matched prints at four scenes; Gary blamed another man for the rapes and killings. In 1986 a jury convicted him of three counts each of malice murder, rape and burglary for the deaths of Florence Scheible, 89, Martha Thurmond, 69, and Kathleen Woodruff, 74. Prosecutors said he committed all nine attacks. His lawyers argued that DNA testing pointed away from him, while the state cited a DNA match to victim Jean Dimenstein, and courts denied him a new trial. Georgia executed Gary at the state prison in Jackson on March 15, 2018. He was 67. [19] [20]
Between 1984 and 1986, five women were killed in Honolulu in a series that PBS Hawaii describes as the case of Hawaii’s first serial killer. Vicki Purdy, 25, went missing on May 29, 1984, and was found strangled near Keehi Lagoon, her hands tied behind her back. Regina Sakamoto, 17, a Leilehua High School student, was last seen at a Waipahu bus stop on January 14, 1986, and was found less than a mile from where Purdy had been. Denise Hughes, 21, Louise Medeiros, 24, who was three months pregnant, and Linda Pesce, 36, were killed in the following months. A task force formed with FBI help. On May 3, 1986, Howard Andrew Gay, 43, called police claiming a psychic had told him where Pesce’s body was, and he led officers to Sand Island. He was arrested May 9, and one woman picked him out of a lineup but would not testify. The victims had been bound with strapping tape or zip ties, materials Gay could reach at his air cargo job. Police watched him for years without gathering enough evidence. Gay died in California in 2003 without being charged. Police offered a $25,000 reward; the case remains unsolved. [21] [22]
Lyda Southard, later called “Lady Bluebeard,” is described as Idaho’s first known serial killer. She married her first husband in 1912 and settled on his brother’s ranch near Twin Falls. In 1915 her 3-year-old daughter died, supposedly from dirty water, her brother-in-law died of supposed food poisoning, and a few months later her husband died, reportedly of typhoid fever. Between 1915 and 1920 she married three more men, and each died within a few years, again supposedly of typhoid. She collected life insurance on several of the deaths and was named beneficiary on her husbands’ policies. Investigators found her in Hawaii with her fifth husband and brought her back to Idaho. She was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of her fourth husband, Edward F. Meyer, and sentenced to 10 years to life; she was never tried for the other deaths. She escaped from the Idaho State Penitentiary using a saw supplied by another prisoner, married a widower in Colorado, fled to Kansas, and was returned to prison in 1931. She was released on probation in 1941 and pardoned that year, after 18 years, 7 months and 23 days in custody. She died of a heart attack in 1958. [23]
John Wayne Gacy killed at least 33 boys and young men between 1972 and 1978 at his house at 8213 West Summerdale Avenue in Norwood Park, a neighborhood on the northwest edge of Chicago. Before that he had lived in Waterloo, Iowa, where he was convicted in 1968 of a sexual offense against a teenage boy and paroled in 1970. His first known victim was Timothy McCoy, 16, killed in January 1972. Most of the victims were buried on his property, many in the crawl space under the house, and by 1978 he was dropping bodies into the Des Plaines River. The case broke after 15-year-old Robert Piest disappeared on December 11, 1978. Police searching Gacy’s home found a receipt belonging to Piest, which led to further searches, the discovery of remains, and Gacy’s confession. On March 12, 1980, a Cook County jury convicted him of 33 murders, and he was sentenced to death for 12 of them. He was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois, on May 10, 1994. Work to identify the remaining unnamed victims has continued, with DNA identifications announced in 2017 and 2021. [24] [25] [26]
Larry Eyler, known in the press as the “Highway Killer,” was linked to the murders of young men whose bodies were left along highways in Indiana and Illinois in the early 1980s. On October 18, 1983, mushroom hunters found four men buried at an abandoned barn off US-41 in Lake Village, Newton County, Indiana; investigators attributed all four to Eyler. Two were identified as Michael Bauer and John Bartlett, and in 2021 the Newton County Coroner’s Office used genetic genealogy to identify a third as John Ingram Brandenburg Jr. of Chicago. Eyler was arrested in October 1983 after a traffic stop turned up a bloody knife and boots, but the evidence was excluded and he was released. A year later the dismembered body of Danny Bridges was found in Chicago, and blood in Eyler’s apartment matched Bridges. Eyler was convicted of that murder in 1986 and sentenced to death. In December 1990 he confessed to killing Steven Agan, 23, in Indiana in 1982 and received 60 years. He also offered to confess to more than 20 other killings in exchange for a life sentence, which prosecutors refused. Eyler died of AIDS-related complications in prison on March 6, 1994. [27] [28]
The old version of this list gave Iowa the Villisca axe murders of 1912, in which eight people, six of them children, were killed in one house in one night. That was a single unsolved mass killing, not a series, and no one was ever convicted. We could not find a well-documented case of a serial killer whose killings took place inside Iowa. The state’s connections run the other way. The Des Moines Register has traced eleven serial killers with ties to Iowa, among them John Wayne Gacy, who managed fast-food restaurants in Waterloo and served prison time at Anamosa before his killings in Illinois, and Robert Hansen, who grew up in Estherville and served time for arson there before moving to Alaska (see Alaska). [25] [29]
Dennis Rader killed 10 people in and around Wichita between 1974 and 1991 and named himself “BTK,” for “bind, torture, kill.” His first victims were four members of the Otero family, Joseph and Julie Otero and two of their children, killed on January 15, 1974. Later victims included Kathryn Bright, Shirley Vian, Nancy Fox, Marine Hedge, Vicki Wegerle and Dolores Davis, his last known victim, in 1991. After years of silence, Rader resumed contact in 2004 with letters to The Wichita Eagle and other outlets. Police traced metadata on a floppy disk he sent to a Wichita TV station to Christ Lutheran Church, where he was congregation president, and linked him to crime scene DNA through a sample from his daughter’s medical records. He was arrested on February 25, 2005. In June 2005 he pleaded guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder, and he received 10 consecutive life terms; Kansas had no death penalty when the murders occurred. He was sent to El Dorado Correctional Facility. Reporting through late 2025 described him as still held there. [30] [31]
Donald Harvey, a former nurse’s aide later called the “Angel of Death,” began killing in 1970 while working as an orderly at Marymount Hospital in London, Kentucky. His first known victim was Logan Evans, 88, a stroke patient Harvey smothered with a pillow in May 1970, and he said he killed several more elderly patients there in the following months. He later worked at hospitals in Cincinnati, including the Veterans Administration Medical Center and Drake Memorial Hospital, where 21 of his victims were patients. He mostly used arsenic and cyanide, and he also let some patients’ oxygen run out. He was caught after the March 1987 death of John Powell, 44, at Drake, when the pathologist performing the autopsy smelled cyanide and alerted police. In August 1987 Harvey pleaded guilty in Hamilton County, Ohio, to 24 counts, and in November 1987 he pleaded guilty in Kentucky to nine more. In all he admitted to 37 murders and later claimed more. On March 28, 2017, he was beaten in his cell at Toledo Correctional Institution in Ohio, and he died two days later at age 64. Another inmate later confessed to the attack. [32] [33]
Derrick Todd Lee, of St. Francisville, was linked by DNA to the killings of seven women in south Louisiana, most of them in and around Baton Rouge between 2001 and 2003. Victims included Gina Wilson Green, 39, a nurse; Geralyn Barr DeSoto, 21, killed on January 14, 2002; Charlotte Murray Pace, 22, killed on May 31, 2002; Pamela Kinamore, 44; Trineisha Dene Colomb, 23; and Carrie Lynn Yoder, 26. His DNA also matched evidence in the cases of Connie Warner, who disappeared in 1992, and Randi Mebruer, abducted in 1998, though he was never charged in those deaths. In 2003 an investigator with the Louisiana attorney general’s office obtained a warrant for a DNA sample from Lee, who had prior arrests for peeping and stalking. Lee fled to Atlanta, where he was arrested and returned to Baton Rouge. In August 2004 he was convicted of murdering Geralyn DeSoto and sentenced to life. Later in 2004 he was convicted of murdering Charlotte Murray Pace and of the attempted murder of Dianne Alexander, who survived an attack, and he was sentenced to death. Lee died of heart disease on January 21, 2016, while on death row at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. [34] [35]
James Hicks killed three women in central and northern Maine over nearly two decades. His first wife, Jennie Cyr Hicks, 23, disappeared from their home in Etna in 1977. Without her body, prosecutors still won a murder conviction in 1984, and Hicks served six years. Jerilyn Towers, 34, of Newport, disappeared in 1982 after leaving a Newport bar with him, and Lynn Willette, 40, the woman he lived with in Brewer, disappeared in 1996. In 2000 Hicks was arrested in Lubbock, Texas, for attacking and robbing a woman in her home and faced 55 years there. He agreed to confess to the Maine killings and lead police to the remains in exchange for serving his time in Maine first. In October 2000 he led investigators to remains behind his former Etna home and at a roadside site south of Houlton. All three women had been strangled and dismembered. Hicks pleaded guilty to the murders of Towers and Willette, and in December 2000 he was sentenced to two concurrent life terms; Maine has no parole. Sources found do not report his death, and he was last reported as serving life in the Maine prison system. [36] [37] [38]
Melvin Rees, a Washington-area jazz musician, was convicted of murdering Margaret Harold near Annapolis, Maryland, and four members of the Jackson family. Harold was out for a drive with her boyfriend when a man forced their car off the road and shot her; her boyfriend escaped and called police. About two years later, on January 11, 1959, Carroll Jackson, 29, his wife Mildred, 27, and their daughters Susan, 5, and Janet, 1, were abducted at gunpoint on a road in Virginia Carroll and Janet were found under brush near Fredericksburg, Virginia, and Mildred and Susan were later found in a shallow grave beside an abandoned building. A tip led authorities to Rees in West Memphis, Arkansas. Harold’s boyfriend picked him out of a lineup, and a search turned up a .38 pistol and a note describing the crimes. Rees was tried in February 1961 for Harold’s murder and in September 1961 for the Jackson murders, was convicted in both and sentenced to death. Detectives also linked him to four other Maryland killings that were never charged. His death sentence was commuted to life in 1972, and he died of heart failure in prison in 1995. [39]
Between 1962 and January 1964, 11 women were killed in the Boston area in the series that came to be called the Boston Strangler murders. The last was Mary Sullivan, 19, who was raped and killed in her Beacon Hill apartment in January 1964. Albert DeSalvo confessed to all 11 killings, then recanted. He was never charged with any of them. He was serving a life sentence on other charges, including armed robbery and sexual assault, when another inmate stabbed him to death in prison in 1973. For decades experts disagreed on whether one man committed all the murders. In July 2013 Boston police, the Massachusetts attorney general and the Suffolk County district attorney announced that DNA evidence linked DeSalvo to Sullivan’s murder. Investigators first found a familial match through a nephew, then exhumed DeSalvo’s body from a Peabody cemetery and confirmed the match; they put the odds that another white male left the evidence at one in 220 billion. Attorney General Martha Coakley said the evidence left no doubt DeSalvo killed Sullivan. Officials said they had no comparable DNA from the other crime scenes, so the remaining cases cannot be confirmed the same way. [40] [41]
Coral Eugene Watts, a mechanic, killed women in Michigan in the 1970s before moving to the Houston area, where he confessed to killing 12 women in 1981 and 1982, among them Linda Tilley and Michelle Maday. He was arrested in 1982 after attacking two roommates in Houston, one of whom escaped and screamed for help. Under a 1982 deal with Texas prosecutors he received immunity for the killings he admitted and a 60-year sentence for burglary with intent to commit murder. Mandatory release rules later cut that sentence, and he was due for release in April 2006. Michigan authorities then reopened old cases. In November 2004 a jury in Pontiac convicted him of stabbing Helen Dutcher, 36, to death in December 1979 near 8 Mile and Woodward on the Detroit border, after a witness came forward following a television appeal. Watts received life without parole. Kalamazoo prosecutors then charged him in the 1974 stabbing of Gloria Steele, 19, a Western Michigan University student, and he was sentenced in that case in 2007. Investigators believed he may have killed as many as 80. Watts died of prostate cancer in 2007, at age 53, in the prison ward of a Jackson-area hospital. [42] [43] [44]
Joseph Ture Jr. is serving six life sentences for murders committed in Minnesota between 1978 and 1980. Early on December 15, 1978, he shot Alice Huling, 36, and three of her children, Susan, Patti and Wayne, in their home in Clearwater. Her 11-year-old son, William, escaped and later testified. In 1979 Marlys Wohlenhaus, 18, was beaten to death in her home in Afton, and in 1980 Diane Edwards, 19, was abducted in St. Paul while walking home from work at a Perkins restaurant and stabbed to death. Four days after the Huling murders, Ture was arrested in a stolen car holding a list of nearly 200 women’s names, but he was not charged with those murders until 1999. Jailed in 1980 for abducting and assaulting women, he was convicted of the Edwards murder in December 1981. He confessed to the Wohlenhaus killing in 1981, but a mistaken alibi cleared him until he was charged in 1996; he was convicted in 1998. He was convicted of the four Huling murders in January 2000 after confessing to another inmate. On January 13, 2026, the Minnesota Department of Corrections release board denied him parole and continued his next review for 20 years. [45] [46] [47]
Samuel Little, whom the FBI called the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history, confessed in 2018 to 93 murders committed across the country between the 1970s and 2005, and the FBI judged his confessions credible. Several of the killings were in Mississippi. The FBI said he confessed to killings in Gulfport, Jackson and Pascagoula. Harrison County charged him with the strangling deaths of Julia Critchfield, 36, whose body was found in a dirt pit in Saucier in 1978, and of Alice Taylor and her friend Tracy Johnson, both found in 1992. He also confessed to killing Melinda Lapree of Pascagoula, found in a cemetery ditch in Gautier in 1982, and a 16-year-old boy in Jackson in 1984 who has not been identified. He was arrested on a narcotics charge in Kentucky in 2012 and extradited to California, where DNA tied him to three Los Angeles murders from 1987 and 1989; he was convicted in 2014 and sentenced to three consecutive life terms without parole. At least 50 of his confessions had been verified by 2019. Little died on December 30, 2020, at age 80, while in custody in California. [48] [49] [50]
Charles Ray Hatcher was a drifter with a long criminal record who was convicted of murdering two children in St. Joseph, Missouri. On May 26, 1978, four-year-old Eric Christgen was abducted from a shopping mall in St. Joseph and killed. Police pressured a local house painter, Melvin Reynolds, into a false confession, and Reynolds was convicted in 1979 and sentenced to life. In 1982 an 11-year-old St. Joseph girl, Michelle Steele, was abducted and killed in a similar way, and police arrested Hatcher, then 54. While awaiting trial he told an FBI agent he had also killed Eric Christgen, and his account matched the crime scene and the eyewitness descriptions far better than Reynolds’s had. Reynolds was freed in October 1983 and his conviction was reversed. Hatcher received life sentences for both murders. He was a suspect in 14 other killings around the country and confessed to 16 murders committed between 1969 and 1982. At his sentencing for the Steele murder in 1984 he asked for the death penalty, but the jury recommended life. He hanged himself in his cell on December 7, 1984. [51] [52] [26]
In June 1973, 7-year-old Susan “Susie” Jaeger was taken from her family’s tent during a camping trip near Manhattan, Montana. In February 1974, Sandra Smallegan, a local 19-year-old, disappeared, and her car was later found hidden in a barn on an abandoned ranch. FBI agents Teten and Mullany, then developing the bureau’s early approach to criminal profiling, suggested the killer was a local young man with military training. That fit David Meirhofer, a 23-year-old Vietnam veteran who had already been named by an anonymous caller but had passed a polygraph. On the first anniversary of the kidnapping, he phoned Marietta Jaeger, Susie’s mother, without giving his name. She kept him on the line for about an hour while the FBI monitored the call, and she recognized his voice. Bone fragments found on the ranch near where he had worked were identified as Sandra’s. After his arrest in 1974, Meirhofer admitted to four killings, including Susie’s, and took his own life within hours, so he never stood trial. The case is regarded as one of the first in which FBI profiling helped identify a killer. [53] [54]
On September 18, 1983, Danny Joe Eberle, 13, disappeared while delivering the Omaha World-Herald in Bellevue, Nebraska. His body was found a few days later in a rural area about four miles away; he had been bound with rope and stabbed. On December 2, 1983, Christopher Walden, 12, vanished while walking to school near Papillion, the first day his mother had let him walk alone since Danny’s death. His body was recovered on December 5. On January 11, 1984, a Bellevue day care operator reported a man cruising the street and gave police a license plate number. The car was traced to John Joubert, a 20-year-old radar technician at Offutt Air Force Base. He was carrying a hunting knife and a length of rope that matched the rope used on Danny, and he confessed to both killings that day. Joubert was convicted of the two Nebraska murders and sentenced to death in 1984. He also confessed to the 1982 killing of Richard “Ricky” Stetson, 11, in Portland, Maine, and was later convicted of that murder. Nebraska executed him in the electric chair in 1996. [55] [56] [57]
Carroll Edward Cole was convicted of murdering five women, and he claimed to have killed more than a dozen. The case that brought him to Nevada’s death row was the killing of Marie Cushman in Las Vegas, and Nevada sentenced him to death for her murder. His convictions cover Cushman and four other women; the rest of the deaths he described rest on his own claims and were never proven in court. Cole did not fight to stay alive. Like Jesse Bishop, an earlier Nevada death row prisoner, he said he wanted to be executed. On December 6, 1985, at age 47, Cole was put to death at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City. He was the first person in Nevada executed by lethal injection. Because his wider confessions were never tested at trial, the full count of women he killed remains unknown. [58]
In 1985, a barrel holding human remains was found on wooded land in Allenstown, New Hampshire, just outside Bear Brook State Park. In 2000, a second barrel turned up about 300 feet away. Together they held the remains of a woman and three girls, who went unnamed for decades. Investigators came to believe the killer was Terry Peder Rasmussen, a man who used several aliases, including “Bob Evans.” In 2019, DNA testing and genetic genealogy identified three of the victims as Marlyse Honeychurch and her daughters, Marie Vaughn, about 9, and Sarah McWaters, about 2. Honeychurch was last seen at her mother’s home in La Puente, California, at Thanksgiving 1978. In 2025, the fourth victim was identified as Rea Rasmussen, his own daughter, who was about 3. He is also presumed responsible for the disappearance of Denise Beaudin, last seen with him in Manchester in 1981, and authorities believe Rea’s mother, Pepper Reed, was another victim. His only conviction came in California, where in 2003 he pleaded guilty in the death of Eunsoon Jun, whose body was found in his basement, and received 15 years. Rasmussen died in prison in 2010, at 62, without being charged in New Hampshire. [59] [60]
Richard Cottingham worked as a computer operator at Blue Cross Blue Shield in New York while killing women in New York City and northern New Jersey. On May 22, 1980, he took a woman to a Quality Inn in New Jersey and began torturing her. Motel staff heard her cries and called police, who arrested him. An FBI fingerprint specialist matched his thumbprint to a handcuff on the body of Valerie Ann Street, 19. In 1981 he was sentenced to 173 to 197 years for her murder. Further trials brought his total to five murder convictions: three in New York City and two in northern New Jersey. In 2022 he admitted killing five women on Long Island in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and received 25 years to life for the 1968 killing of Diane Cusick, 23. In January 2026, Fair Lawn police said he had confessed to killing Alys Eberhardt, 18, a nursing student, in 1965; he will not face new charges. Authorities link him to about a dozen killings; he has claimed up to 100. As of January 2026 he was 79 and held at South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton, New Jersey. [61] [62]
Between 2003 and 2006, at least 19 women and girls disappeared from the streets of Albuquerque; most were Latina women in their 20s, and many were sex workers. On February 2, 2009, a woman walking her dog on the West Mesa saw a bone sticking out of the ground near 118th Street SW. Digging uncovered shallow graves holding the remains of 11 women and girls and an unborn child. Police identified all 11, among them Jamie Barela, 15, and her cousin Evelyn Salazar, 27, and Gina Michelle Valdez, 22, who was four months pregnant. Each died by homicidal violence. Eight other women from the same period, including Martha Lucher and Anna Vigil, are still missing. No one has been charged. A&E reports that investigators have named Lorenzo Montoya, who lived near the site and was shot dead in 2006 after killing another young woman, as a primary suspect; no DNA at the site has matched a killer. In February 2026, Albuquerque police said the case remains active, that a new search warrant had been served, and that a $100,000 reward is offered. [63] [64]
Between July 1976 and July 1977, a gunman with a .44-caliber revolver shot 13 people in New York City, killing six and wounding seven. Those killed were Donna Lauria, Christine Freund, Virginia Voskerichian, Valentina Suriani, Alexander Esau and Stacy Moskowitz. After the final shooting in Brooklyn on July 31, 1977, a parking ticket written near the scene led investigators to a car owned by David Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker from Yonkers. Yonkers police, already looking into his harassment of a neighbor, had also alerted the task force. He was arrested outside his home on August 10, 1977, and admitted to being the Son of Sam. In May 1978 he pleaded guilty to six murders and received six sentences of 25 years to life. His case led New York to pass the first “Son of Sam” law, which directs a criminal’s profits from telling his story to victims’ compensation. He has been denied parole repeatedly since 2002 and skipped his May 2026 hearing. He is held at Shawangunk Correctional Facility. [65] [66] [67]
Henry Louis Wallace, who grew up in Barnwell, South Carolina, killed 11 Black women over about four years, ten of them after he moved to Charlotte, where he managed a Taco Bell restaurant. Ten were friends or acquaintances, including three who worked at his restaurant, and they let him into their homes. The first known victim’s body was found in March 1990, and the last killing came in March 1994. His victims included Tashanda Bethea, 18, Shawna Hawk, 20, Caroline Love, 20, Betty Jean Baucom, 24, and Debra Slaughter, 35. In one attack he also tried to strangle the 10-month-old son of Brandi Henderson, 18; the boy survived. Investigators identified Wallace after finding Baucom’s car and lifting a palm print from its trunk. He was arrested in March 1994, shortly after his last killing, and confessed to 11 murders. In January 1997 a jury convicted him of nine murders, along with rape, other sexual offenses and robbery, and he was sentenced to death. Wallace was not among the 15 people whose death sentences Governor Roy Cooper commuted in December 2024. As of 2026 he remains on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh. [68] [69]
Eugene Butler came from Niagara County, New York, and homesteaded in Grand Forks County in the early 1880s, naming his farm Niagara. He became the wealthiest farmer in the area but lived as a recluse and was known for riding at night. In 1904, his family had him committed to the North Dakota State Hospital in Jamestown, where he died in 1911. On June 26, 1915, Leo Verkuehlen, who had bought the property, was digging near the house’s foundation when he found six human skeletons in a shallow grave in the crawlspace. Each skull had a hole on the left side, suggesting a blow from a sharp object. Five appeared to have been buried together and one separately, at a different time. The killings are estimated to have taken place between about 1884 and 1904. Butler never admitted to the deaths and was never charged; the case against him rests on the bodies under his house and neighbors’ accounts of his anger at hired hands. None of the six victims has ever been identified, and many of the bones were carried off as souvenirs in 1915. [70]
From 1935 to 1938, an unidentified killer murdered and dismembered at least 12 people in Cleveland, many of them found in and around Kingsbury Run, where people left destitute by the Great Depression lived in encampments. All were decapitated, and most were never identified. Among those who were is Edward Andrassy, 28, found at the base of Jackass Hill in September 1935 and identified by fingerprints. Florence “Flo” Polillo, found in January 1936, was also identified by fingerprints, and Rose Wallace, found in June 1937, was identified unofficially through dental work. A body found in September 1934 was later added to the count, which is why some tallies list 13 victims. Eliot Ness, then Cleveland’s Safety Director, took a larger role in the case in the fall of 1936. In August 1938 he led a raid on the Kingsbury Run shantytowns, which were burned afterward. In 1939 Frank Dolezal, a bricklayer, was arrested for Polillo’s murder but died in his cell before trial, and few believe he was the killer. Ness suspected a surgeon, Francis E. Sweeney, who was never charged. The case remains officially unsolved. [71]
Nannie Doss married five times, and four of her husbands died after she poisoned them. Frank Harrelson died in 1945 after she allegedly put rat poison in his moonshine. Arlie Lanning of Lexington, North Carolina, died in 1950, and Richard Morton died in Kansas in 1953, poisoned with arsenic in his coffee. In June 1953 she married Samuel Doss of Tulsa, Oklahoma. He survived an arsenic-laced prune cake, then died after drinking arsenic-laced coffee. His doctor suspected poisoning and persuaded her to allow an autopsy, which found enough arsenic to alert police. Under questioning she confessed to killing her husbands. Officials also linked her to the deaths of her mother, her sister Dovie, two of her own children and two grandchildren, and speculated that she killed as many as 12 people. North Carolina, Kansas and Alabama brought charges, but she was tried only in Oklahoma. Found guilty of Samuel Doss’s murder, she was spared the death penalty and sentenced to life in prison in 1955. She died of leukemia on June 2, 1965, and is buried in McAlester, Oklahoma. [72]
Randall Woodfield was drafted by the Green Bay Packers in 1974 and released in the preseason. He later pleaded guilty to reduced second-degree robbery charges, received 10 years in the Oregon State Penitentiary, and was paroled by 1979. On October 11, 1980, Cherie Ayers, his first known murder victim, was found raped and killed in her Portland apartment. On January 18, 1981, in Keizer, he shot two 20-year-old cleaning women, Shari Hull and Beth Wilmot. Hull died; Wilmot survived and later picked him out of a lineup. Investigators linked a .32-caliber bullet found at his apartment to the murder weapon, and he was indicted in March 1981. He was convicted of Hull’s murder, Wilmot’s attempted murder and sodomy, and sentenced to life plus 90 years, with 35 more years added for a separate attack. In 2012, DNA and other forensic advances tied him to five more killings, including Darcey Fix and Douglas Altig in Portland and Julie Reitz in Beaverton. He was not prosecuted for them. Police have suspected him in 18 to 24 deaths. He has never confessed and remains at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. [73] [74] [75]
Harvey Miguel Robinson was a teenager in Allentown, Pennsylvania, when he killed three women and girls in 1992 and 1993. His first victim was Joan Burghardt, 29, a nurse’s aide, raped and killed in 1992. In 1993 he killed Jessica Fortney and a teenage girl. That summer he also attacked people who survived, including Denise Sam-Cali, raped at her home on June 28, 1993. Believing her attacker might return, police set up covert surveillance in her house. Early on July 31, 1993, an intruder climbed through a window and exchanged gunfire with an officer before escaping. Hours later Robinson, then 18, arrived at a hospital with two gunshot wounds and was arrested. Survivors and DNA evidence identified him. He was convicted in 1995 and sentenced to death, but his death sentences were later overturned or reduced, and after a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on juvenile offenders, he was resentenced in 2019 to 35 years to life for Burghardt’s murder. As of 2024 he was serving life sentences. [76] [77] [78] [79]
Craig Price, known as the “Warwick Slasher,” killed four people in his Warwick neighborhood while still a teenager. In July 1987 he stabbed Rebecca Spencer, 27, about 60 times in her home. In 1989, at age 15, he killed Joan Heaton, 39, and her daughters, Jennifer, 10, and Melissa, 8, in their Warwick home; Joan Heaton was stabbed nearly 60 times and Jennifer 62 times. That is four killings in two separate incidents. Price was convicted as a juvenile. His time behind bars was later extended by convictions for crimes he committed while in custody. He has been held in Florida since 2004. In 2017 he stabbed a fellow inmate there, and in January 2019 he pleaded guilty to attempted murder and received 25 years in prison followed by 10 years of probation. Before that plea, Florida had listed a tentative release date of November 2019. The most recent reports reviewed show him still serving the Florida sentence. [80]
Donald Henry Gaskins was born March 31, 1933, near Prospect in Florence County, South Carolina. He was called “Pee Wee” because he stood barely five feet tall. Beginning in the late 1960s he killed hitchhikers and drifters he picked up on South Carolina highways, a period he called his “coastal kills.” He also killed people he knew, some of them, he said, for pay. His victims included teenagers, young women and elderly people. In 1975 police grew suspicious after a 13-year-old girl and others close to him disappeared. A search of his property found shallow graves, and Florence County charged him with five murders. He was sentenced to death on May 28, 1976, but a 1976 South Carolina Supreme Court ruling left him serving consecutive life terms instead. In 1982 he killed death row inmate Rudolph Tyner with a homemade bomb disguised as a radio in a murder-for-hire plot. He was convicted on March 24, 1983, and sentenced to death. Contemporary reports put his confessed toll at 13 before Tyner, though he later claimed far more. Hours after slashing his wrists, he was executed in the electric chair on September 6, 1991, at age 58. [81] [82] [83]
Robert Leroy Anderson killed two women in eastern South Dakota in the 1990s, in the case most often described as the state’s serial killings. Larisa Dumansky, 29, a Ukrainian immigrant, vanished in August 1994 after her night shift at the John Morrell & Co. plant in Sioux Falls. Her partial remains were found in May 1997 in a shallow grave at Lake Vermillion. Piper Streyle, 28, was abducted from her home in Canistota on July 29, 1996, and her body has never been found. Another woman, Amy Anderson (no relation), said that in 1994 Anderson and an accomplice disabled her tire and tried to abduct her, but she escaped. Anderson was convicted of kidnapping Streyle on May 8, 1997. A cellmate then told investigators that Anderson had described hiding victims’ belongings, and police recovered items from his mother’s home. On April 6, 1999, a jury convicted him of both murders, and he was sentenced to death three days later. His friend Glen Walker admitted helping in the Dumansky kidnapping, received 30 years, and was released in 2016. Anderson died by suicide in his cell on March 30, 2003, while his appeal was pending. [84]
Paul Dennis Reid killed seven fast-food workers, most of them teenagers, during robberies in Middle Tennessee in 1997. He was fired from a Shoney’s restaurant in February 1997, and his first victims were found the next day. At a Captain D’s in Donelson he killed Sarah Jackson, 16, and Steve Hampton, 25. At a McDonald’s in Hermitage he killed Andrea Brown, 17, Ronald Santiago, 27, and Robert Sewell Jr., 23. At a Baskin-Robbins in Clarksville he killed Angela Holmes, 21, and Michelle Mace, 16. The killings ran for about two months. In June 1997 he was arrested in Cheatham County after trying to kidnap the manager of the Shoney’s where he had once worked. He was convicted of seven counts of first-degree murder and of the attempted murder of Antonio Gonzalez, and he was sentenced to death. Reid died on November 1, 2013, at age 55, at Nashville General Hospital at Meharry. He was still on death row. At the time, the state medical examiner had not released a cause of death. [85] [86] [87]
Dean Corll, whose family owned a candy factory, killed at least 27 teenage boys and young men in the Houston area between 1970 and 1973. Most were in their mid-teens. Two teenage accomplices, Elmer Wayne Henley and David Owen Brooks, lured victims to Corll’s home in Pasadena, Texas, in exchange for money. There Corll restrained them, sometimes for days, before killing them. His last victim was Stanton Dreymala, 13. The killings ended on August 8, 1973, when Henley shot Corll after Corll threatened to kill him and two friends. Within a week, police had found 27 sets of remains in several burial sites, including a rented boat shed, woods and beaches. Remains of a 28th victim, found in 1983, were identified through DNA in 2009, and investigators believe there may be more. Corll died before any trial. Henley was convicted of six of the murders. Texas denied him parole in November 2025, and he will not be eligible again for 10 years. Brooks died in prison of COVID-19 in 2020. A 2021 search of Corll’s former Pasadena backyard found no human remains. [88] [89]
Arthur Gary Bishop killed five boys, ages 4 to 13, in Salt Lake County between 1979 and 1983. Alonzo Daniels, the first, lived in the apartment across the hall from Bishop and disappeared in 1979. Kim Peterson disappeared in 1980 near a bowling alley close to where Bishop was living, and Danny Davis vanished near a grocery store across the street from another of Bishop’s homes. Troy Ward and Graeme Cunningham went missing in 1983. Police questioned Bishop about Daniels in 1979 but did not question him again until July 1983. At that point, using the name Roger Downs, he became a suspect in Cunningham’s disappearance. During questioning he confessed to killing all five boys. He led detectives to three bodies buried near Cove Fort, and the bodies of Ward and Cunningham were found in Big Cottonwood Creek. In 1984 a jury convicted him of five counts of first-degree murder, five counts of aggravated kidnapping and one count of sexual abuse of a minor. He was sentenced to death. Bishop dropped his appeals and was executed by lethal injection in June 1988, on the June 10 date set in his execution warrant. [90] [91]
Israel Keyes killed Bill and Lorraine Currier, a couple in their 50s, in Essex, Vermont, in June 2011. Investigators said he flew from his home in Alaska to Chicago and drove to Vermont. There he broke into the Curriers’ house, bound them and drove them to an abandoned house, where he shot Bill Currier and sexually assaulted and strangled Lorraine Currier. Keyes was not a suspect until 2012, when he abducted and killed Samantha Koenig, 18, a barista at a coffee stand in Anchorage. He used her debit card at ATMs in Alaska, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas and demanded a ransom. He was arrested in Texas in March 2012. In custody he confessed to the Currier killings, four killings in Washington state and one in New York. Including Koenig, that makes eight known victims, and the FBI believes he committed more kidnappings and murders between 2001 and his arrest. Keyes was never tried. He died by suicide in his cell at an Alaska jail on December 2, 2012. [92]
Timothy Spencer, called the “Southside Strangler,” broke into homes, usually through windows, and strangled four women in the fall of 1987. The victims were Debbie Dudley Davis, 35, found in her Richmond apartment on September 19; Dr. Susan Hellams, 32, a neurosurgical resident, found in her Richmond home on October 3; Diane Cho, 15, an honors student, found in her Chesterfield County home on November 22; and Susan Tucker, 44, a U.S. Forest Service editor, found in her Arlington home on December 1. Arlington Detective Joe Horgas saw links between the cases and the 1984 killing of attorney Carolyn Hamm. He remembered Spencer from a past burglary case and learned that Spencer had been paroled to a Richmond halfway house in September 1987. Spencer was arrested there on January 20, 1988. DNA from his blood matched evidence from the Tucker scene and linked him to the Davis and Hellams cases. He was convicted of all four murders in separate trials, the first U.S. serial killer convicted through DNA evidence. David Vasquez, who had been wrongly convicted in the Hamm case, was pardoned in 1989. Spencer was executed in the electric chair at Greensville Correctional Center on April 27, 1994. [93] [94]
Gary Leon Ridgway, the “Green River Killer,” was born in Salt Lake City in 1949 and worked as a truck painter. Beginning in 1982 he picked up women and girls, many of them runaways or sex workers, along State Route 99 in south King County. He strangled them and hid their bodies. The first five victims were found in or near the Green River in the summer of 1982. He became a suspect but passed a 1984 polygraph. He was arrested in 2001 after DNA linked him to some of the killings. In 2003 he pleaded guilty to murdering 48 women between 1982 and 1998 and received 48 consecutive life sentences, avoiding the death penalty in exchange for helping locate remains. On February 18, 2011, he pleaded guilty to a 49th murder, that of Rebecca “Becky” Marrero, 20, who disappeared in 1982 and whose remains were found near Auburn in 2010. He has reportedly claimed more than 60. He is serving life without parole at the state penitentiary in Walla Walla and was briefly moved to the King County Jail in September 2024 to help search for remains; March 2025 reports described him as alive. [95] [96] [97]
Reta Mays killed seven elderly veterans at the Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, in 2017 and 2018. A nursing assistant from 2015 to 2018, she often worked the overnight shift without supervision. Prosecutors said she injected patients with insulin they did not need, causing sudden drops in blood sugar that killed them. All seven victims were men aged 80 or older. VA employees first brought the suspicious deaths to authorities, which led to a federal investigation. In July 2020 Mays pleaded guilty to seven counts of second-degree murder and one count of assault with intent to commit murder. At her sentencing on May 11, 2021, relatives of the veterans spoke in court, including the daughter of Felix McDermott, an 82-year-old Army veteran, and the son of Robert Edge, an 82-year-old Navy veteran. U.S. District Judge Thomas Kleeh sentenced Mays to seven consecutive life sentences plus 20 years. He noted that during the killings she had searched online for female serial killers. Prosecutors called her actions “predatory and planned.” Mays, who was 46 at sentencing, is serving her life sentences in federal custody. [98] [99]
Jeffrey Dahmer, born May 21, 1960, in Milwaukee, killed at least 17 boys and young men between 1978 and 1991. He committed his first killing in 1978, when he killed a hitchhiker, Steven Hicks. Most of the later killings took place in Milwaukee, where he lured victims, many of them Black and gay men, to his apartment, then killed and dismembered them. In May 1991 police were called about Konerak Sinthasomphone, 14, who had escaped from Dahmer’s apartment. Dahmer persuaded the officers that the boy was his intoxicated adult boyfriend, and after they left he killed him. On July 22, 1991, Tracy Edwards escaped from the apartment still wearing a handcuff and flagged down a police car. Officers found human remains inside, and Dahmer was arrested. He pleaded guilty to 15 murders, and in February 1992 he was sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms. At the hearing, Rita Isbell, the sister of victim Errol Lindsey, confronted him. A 16th conviction followed later. On November 28, 1994, fellow inmate Christopher Scarver killed Dahmer and inmate Jesse Anderson at Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin. [100] [101] [102]
Keith Hunter Jesperson, a long-haul trucker known as the “Happy Face Killer,” killed eight women between 1990 and 1995 in Oregon, California, Florida, Washington and Wyoming. His Wyoming victim was Angela Subrize, 21, of Oklahoma City, whom he met at a Spokane, Washington, truck stop. He told detectives he strangled her at a truck stop outside Cheyenne and dumped her body along Interstate 80 in Nebraska, where it was found months later. Two people were wrongly convicted of killing his first victim, Taunja Bennett, 21, near Portland in 1990, and served nearly six years before Jesperson’s conviction cleared them. After his girlfriend, Julie Ann Winningham, 41, was killed in March 1995 in Washington state, investigators questioned him. He confessed in a letter to his brother and turned himself in on March 24, 1995. From jail he wrote letters claiming as many as 160 killings, signed with a smiley face, and later recanted most of them. Extradited to Wyoming in December 1997, he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in Subrize’s death to avoid the death penalty and received a life sentence. As of 2025 he was serving multiple life sentences at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. [103] [104]