When you think of serial killers, the image that comes to mind is “white males.” This is due to the fact that white males have been singled-out by FBI profiling for decades. However, there have been serial killers of every race, gender, sexual orientation, and social economic status. For the last three decades running, the majority of serial killers have been black. Asians have the lowest incidence of serial killings in the US in comparison to other racial groups. This is a list of just some of the most prolific serial killers and their victim body counts.
Jake Bird was an African American transient who supported himself as a manual laborer and railroad Gandy dancer, who laid and maintained tracks. Although the newspapers labeled Bird the “Tacoma Ax-Killer, “ his case failed to capture the attention of the national press.
Bird had an extensive criminal record, including burglary and attempted murder, and had been incarcerated for a total of 31 years in Michigan, Iowa, and Utah. He confessed to 44 murders during his travels as a hobo across the country.
It seemed that Bird like one particular type of victim ---- white women. He particularly liked white women cowering in fear of him. At least eleven crimes were solved through Bird’s confessions. Starting with the axe murders of two women at Evanston, Illinois, in 1942.
Other victims were confirmed in Louisville, Kentucky; Omaha, Nebraska; Kansas City, Kansas; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Cleveland, Ohio; Orlando, Florida; and Portege, Wisconsin. By the time of his arrest in 1947, Bird would claim a body count approaching one victim for each year of his life.
In the verified cases, most of his victims had been killed with hatchets or axes in their homes. Bird’s killing ended with the murders of two Tacoma, Washington women. The evidence implicating Bird was the brain tissue and blood of both victims that was found on his clothing and Bird’s fingerprints were left on the axe in blood.
The case went to the jury and they delivered a guilty verdict after deliberating 35 minutes. The jury recommended a death sentence and Bird’s lawyer concurred. The judge sentenced him to death by hanging.
He was hanged on the morning of July 15, 1949, at 12:20am, before 125 witnesses, at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the prison cemetery. Jake Bird was the 63rd prisoner and the seventh African American to be executed in Washington since the death penalty was established in 1904.
Andre Crawford is an African American convicted serial killer who killed 11 women between 1993 to 1999. He was also found guilty of committing a series of rapes on Chicago’s South Side. Crawford, who was dubbed the “Englewood -Area Serial Killer,” was accused of stabbing, strangling, and bludgeoning 11 drug addicts and prostitutes.
He was also accused of brutally assaulting a 12th victim who escaped after pretending to be dead. Crawford reportedly killed the victims, smoked crack cocaine, and returned to have sex with their corpses in the same abandoned buildings where some of their decayed bodies were found months later.
He was linked by DNA to seven of the victims, and confessed to all eleven murders. In January 2000, Crawford was charged with 10 counts of first-degree murder, 11 counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault, and one count of attempted murder.
Prosecutors said Crawford’s videotaped confession took three days. In it he said he killed the women he lured from the streets into abandoned buildings to exchange drugs for sex. Crawford was sentenced to life in prison without parole on December 17, 2009. He is serving his sentence in Menard Correctional Center.
Anthony Edward Sowell is an African American serial killer, identified in press reports as the “Cleveland Strangler.” In September 2009, Sowell invited a woman he knew to his home for a drink. On September 22, 2009, she reported to police that after a few drinks, he became angry, hit her, choked her and raped her as she passed out.
On October 29, police arrived at his home with a warrant to arrest him for the alleged rape. He wasn’t there, but they found two bodies on the floor in the living room. The bodies of four other women were found throughout the home, buried in a shallow grave in the basement, and in crawl spaces in the house.
After digging in the back yard, investigators found three more bodies and the remains of a fourth. Police also found a human skull in a bucket inside the house, which brought the body count to eleven. Most of the victims were killed by manual strangulation and many still had ligatures or gags on their bodies when they were discovered.
Sowell also had at least three more rape victims that he had actually let live. All three never reported the attacks, due to their prior drug history or other personal reasons. Most of the victims were nude from the waist down, strangled with household objects, and had traces of cocaine or depressants in their systems. All the victims were black.
Sowell was charged with 85 counts of murder, rape, and kidnapping; he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. On July 22, 2011, he was convicted on all but two counts against him, including the murders of the eleven women whose bodies were found in his house.
On August 10, jurors recommended the death penalty for Sowell. Sowell was sentenced to death on August 12, 2011. He resides on death row at Chillicothe Correctional Institution .East Cleveland police are reopening several cold cases from the late 1980s.
The murders by strangulation used similar modus operandi and stopped when Sowell was arrested in 1989. The FBI is gathering information to see if Sowell may be linked to unsolved cases in cities where he once lived.
In December 2011, Sowell’s former residence at 12205 Imperial Avenue was demolished on the order of city leaders.
Lorenzo Jerome Gilyard, Jr. Is an African American serial killer. He was known as “The Kansas City Strangler.” People close to Gilyard described him as reliable, friendly, helpful, hard working, and “quick to make a joke.”
He was a convicted child molester, having raped the 13-year-old daughter of a friend. Gilyard is considered to have raped and murdered 13 women and girls in a period spanning from 1977 to 1993. Most, if not all of the victims were prostitutes.
All the victims were found shoeless and dumped on secluded spots around Kansas city. Most had cloth or paper towels stuffed into their mouths and ligature marks around their necks. Six victims had items tied around the necks. The items included shoe string, an electrical cord, and the victim’s clothing.
He began strangling prostitutes in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, in 1977, at the age of 26. Gilyard reportedly murdered more women than Jack the Ripper during his time as a serial killer – about 13 – and no one paid attention.
Gilyard was tried on 10 first-degree murder charges and two counts of capital murder in connection with the deaths of 11 prostitutes and one mentally ill woman. The prosecution focused mainly on DNA evidence that criminal forensic experts shows he had sex with the victims around the time they were killed.
Gilyard was convicted and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, on April 14, 2007. He is serving his life sentence in Crossroads Correctional Center.
Wayne Bertram Williams is an American serial killer who was believed to be one of the most prolific serial killers in the 1970s and 1980s. He was also suspected of killing 27 black youths in the Atlanta area, mostly boys between the ages of 7 and 14, from October 1979 to May 1981.
He first became a suspect in the child murder case in May 1981. The Atlanta Child Murders, known locally as the “missing and murdered children case, “ were a series of murders committed in Atlanta, Georgia, from the summer of 1979 until the spring of 1981. Over the two-year period, a minimum of twenty-eight African American children, adolescents and adults, were killed.
In January 1982, Williams was found guilty of the murder of two adult men. The FBI gave him three separate polygraph tests, all of which indicated that Williams was being deceptive in his answers. Williams’ trial began on December 28, 1981.
The prosecutor’s case relied on an abundance of circumstantial evidence. During the two-month trial, prosecutors matched 19 different sources of fibers from Williams’ environment; his bedspread, bathroom, gloves, clothes, carpets, dog and unusual tri-lobal carpet fiber, to a number of victims.
At his trial, the jury was composed of nine women and three men; eight jurors were black and four were white. On February 27, 1982, Williams was convicted on two counts of murder and sentenced to a double term of life imprisonment. The prosecution claimed that Williams hated black youths. He is currently serving his sentence at Hancock State Prison.
Yoo Young-Chul is a South Korean serial killer and self - confessed cannibal. Most of his crimes were committed around noon and in the afternoon when young people were at work and only the elderly were at home.
Yoo was found to have used hammers and knives for the homicides. His targets were mostly wealthy women. Criminal experts said it seemed that Yoo, an ex-convict, intended to kill innocent people to vent his anger over being a social outcast.
Yoo admitted he killed 11 women and buried them in the mountains near Yonsei University in Seoul. Police recovered the remains of their bodies, which had been cut into pieces before being buried. Yoo, who has previously been in prison 14 times for theft and violent behavior, made the surprise confession of the serial murders.
Yoo said he ate parts of his victims to “have his mind clear, “ and would have killed more than 100 people if he had not been caught. Yoo burned three and mutilated at least 11 of his victims, admitting he ate the livers of some of them. He did not touch money or other valuable articles.
The Seoul Central District Court convicted Yoo of 20 murders. The Supreme Court handed down the death penalty to Yoo. Currently, South Korea has 63 convicts on death row, but has not conducted an execution since 1998.
Huang Yong was a Chinese serial killer accused of murdering 17 teenage boys. In September, 2001, Huang started to lure young people from video halls, Internet cafes, and video arcades, to his house, by offering to recommend them for well-paid jobs or to fund their schooling or sightseeing tours.
In his house, Huang drugged the youths and raped them after strangling them with a rope. He tied them to a table and tortured them before strangling them and dismembering their bodies, confessing in court that he wanted to experience the “sensation of killing.”
Huang would sometimes get his victims drunk before tying them to what he called the “intelligent hobbyhorse,” a noodle-processing device, in his home. The victims ranged in age from 15 to 21. Huang kept their belts as souvenirs.
In November 2003, a 16-year-old boy named Zhang Liang went to the police about Huang. At first the investigators were not convinced of Liang’s story, but the boy claimed that Huang had invited him to his apartment by offering him a job.
Once he got there, Huang tried to strangle him and he went unconscious three times. After he woke up, Huang said to him, “I killed at least 25 people. You’re number 26,” but Liang escaped and reported him to the police.
Huang described the motive for his crimes by saying, “I’ve always wanted to be an assassin since I was a kid, but never had the chance. Due to premeditated murder, Huang was sentenced to death with his political rights taken away for the rest of his life. Huang Yong the 29-year-old son of a pig farmer, was executed on December 26, 2003.
Futoshi Matsunaga is a Japanese serial killer who both defrauded and tortured his victims in what is publicly known as the Kitakushu Serial Murder Incident. He murdered his victims with an accomplice , Junko Ogata.
His crimes were so atrocious that most mass media were not willing to report the details. Matsunaga and Junko dismembered and boiled their victims’ remains in pots. Their neighbors heard strange noises and smelled a stench. A neighbor said they could hear the sound of a saw being used in Matsunaga and Junko’s apartment until about 3 am for about a week in the summer of ’97. The victims’ remains were finally disposed of in washrooms or put out to sea.
Matsunaga blamed the murders on Junko, who, with their two children, were the only survivors in her family. A 17-year- old girl escaped the clutches of Matsunaga and Junko and revealed that they had killed Junko’s parents, sister, brother-in-law and their two children, as well as the girl’s own father. All the bodies were chopped into little pieces and later dumped into the sea.
Matsunaga was convicted of six counts of murder and one count of manslaughter. On September 28, 2005, a district in Fukuoka sentenced Matsunaga and Junko to death by hanging. A High Court upheld Matsunaga’s original sentence, but Junko’s sentence was changed from death by hanging to life imprisonment because Matsunaga had exerted control over Junko to force her to kill the victims.
Lam Kor-wan is one of Hong Kong’s two known serial killers. Lam, who worked as a taxi driver, would pick up female passengers, strangle them with electrical wire, take them to his family home, and dismember them.
His nickname, “The Jars Murderer,” was coined when the police revealed that he had hoarded sexual organs in Tupperware containers. Lam was a photographer and frequently took pictures and video of his victims, filming himself performing an act of necrophilia with his fourth victim.
The Chinese press nicknamed him “The Rainy Night Butcher, “ because several of his attacks occurred during inclement weather. He was also known as “The Rainy Night Killer” and “The Hong Kong Butcher.”
Lam worked the nightshift, so he was able to dismember his victims at home during the daytime without his immediate family finding out. The bodies were disposed of via his taxi in the New Territories and on Hong Kong Island, and all were eventually located.
Lam was arrested by undercover officers when a Hong Kong Kodak shop manager tipped them off to Lam attempting to develop photographs of one of his dismembered victims. They were waiting for him when he returned to pick up the photos.
The police performed a search of Lam’s apartment when he claimed the photos were property of a friend, whom he told police would be meeting him shortly to retrieve them but never showed up. During the search the police located an old ammunition box in his bedroom which contained pornography and more photographs of body parts, video tapes, and the Tupperware containers containing the victims’ sexual organs.
At the end of a 21-day trial with a seven member all male jury, Lam was found guilty of four counts of murder and was sentenced to death by hanging. On August 29, 1984, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, which was the tradition before the abolition of the death penalty in 1993. Lam is currently serving his life sentence at the maximum security facility at Stek Pik.
Yang Xinhai, also known as Wang Ganggang, Yang Zhiya, and Yang Lui, was a Chinese serial killer. He was dubbed the “Monster Killer” by the media and is the most prolific serial killer China has seen. Official Chinese media believed he had carried out China’s longest and grisliest killing spree.
Yang would enter his victims’ homes at night and kill everyone inside with axes, meat cleavers, hammers, and shovels, and he often raped the female victims. His rampage spread across four provinces.
Police said Yang usually carried out his criminal activities at night and cleared the scenes of crime before he ran away. Each time, he wore new clothes and shoes with larger sizes than his own. Yang also claimed he used a new hammer for each murder he committed. Yang is alleged to have also used white gloves during the attacks, often leaving them at the scene of the crime.
Yang set off his killing spree after his girlfriend left him over his criminal past. His motive for the killings was revenge against society as a result of the break up. Later media reports claimed that his enjoyment of robbery, rape and murder was his motive.
When Yang was arrested, he confessed to 65 murders, 23 rapes, and five attacks causing serious injury. Police also matched his DNA with that found at several crime scenes. Later it was discovered that Yang contracted HIV from one of his victims. The details or identities of his victims were not revealed.
Yang was found guilty, after a trial that lasted less than an hour, for the murders of 67 of his victims and the rapes of 25 women. Authorities barred the public and reporters from Yang’s trial, citing privacy concerns in the rape cases. Yang was sentenced to death for his crimes and was executed on February 14, 2004 by a shot in the head.
Mass murders are rare in China, but they and other violent crimes are becoming increasingly common. One thing can be said about serial killing is that it is not confined to any one race, or gender, or age group. It has no boundaries or limits. It does not discriminate. Anyone can become either the killer or become the victim.
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