By Chris Bartholomew
Not all Serial Killers kill their victim on the same day of the abduction or assault. Here we have those who kept the victim alive for a time in order to prolong their ordeal and get the most out of their deeds.
Robert Berdella: he kept men around in dog collars, subjecting them to repeated sexual assaults. He was caught after one of his victims, in a dog collar, escaped and got to a neighbor who called the police. Suspected in at least 8 deaths, in the house, police discovered some 200 photographs of naked men, the subjects bound and clearly suffering from cruel abuse. Torture devices were also seized in the raid, along with a pair of human skulls, occult literature, and a satanic ritual robe. Deputies the next day unearthed bone fragments and another human head in Berdella's yard.
Charlene Gallego: to keep her husband happy, she lured young teens into the couple's van where they were raped and then taken to a remote place and murdered. Between 1978 and 1980, the killer couple murdered nine young girls and one teenaged boy.
Maury Travis: video taped many of his escapades, he hanged himself before confessing, but authorities say he killed between 12 and 20 women. In a letter Travis sent to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which helped lead police to him, he boasted of killing 17 women.
Robert Ben Rhoades: an Arizona cop stopped to investigate a semi parked alongside the highway with its lights flashing. When he stepped up on the running board to look in, he saw a woman shackled inside the cab with a horse bit in her mouth. The cop arrested Rhoades and rescued the woman, who had been held captive on the highways for many days. She had whip marks all up and down her back. She told investigators that he had shackled her and beat her, and that he'd take her out of the truck on lonely stretches of road with a leash around her neck like a dog. Victims who escaped from him told the same story of ongoing tortures that lasted for days.
Elizabeth Báthory: the descriptions of torture that emerged during the trials were often based on hearsay. The atrocities described most consistently included: severe beatings over extended periods of time, often leading to death. Burning or mutilation of hands, sometimes also of faces and genitalia. Biting the flesh off the faces, arms and other bodily parts. Freezing to death. Surgery on victims, often fatal. Starving of victims. Sexual abuse. The use of needles was also mentioned by the collaborators in court.
Gary M. Heidnik: imprisoning several women at a time in a makeshift dungeon in the basement of his Philadelphia home he would subject them to torture, sexual assault and systematic abuse. They would be beaten regularly and forced to have sex with each other and Heidnik depending on his mood. If anyone disobeyed his orders they would be handcuffed to a pipe for days on end or thrown into a deep pit dug in the floor.
Gerard Schaefer: a Martin County Deputy Sheriff, he lured young women off the roads with the help of his badge to torture, mutilate and murder them. He tied victims to trees and left them there while he went to work. Teeth, jewelry, identification papers from several missing women were found in a closet in his mother's house in Ft. Lauderdale.
Gertrude Baniszewski: was an Indiana divorcée who, with the aid of some of her own children and neighborhood children, oversaw and facilitated the prolonged torture, mutilation, and eventual murder of Sylvia Likens, a teenaged girl she had taken into her home.
Harvey Murray Glatman: he had a compulsion to bind and torture his victims with a rope and take pictures of the murders.
H. H. Holmes: he built a large gothic residence that he called "The Castle." It was a maze of sound-proof rooms, secret hallways, hidden staircases, fake walls, and trap doors. He rented out rooms to young female tourists during the Chicago World's Fair, and many of these women were never seen again.
Ian Brady with Myra Hindley: soon after they became a couple, Brady and Hindley began planning a series of bank robberies, which they never carried out. When Brady became fascinated with the idea of rape and murder for sexual gratification, Hindley actively participated in procuring child victims, as well as sexually abusing, torturing and murdering them.
Jeffrey Dahmer: his murders were particularly gruesome, involving rape, torture, dismemberment, necrophilia, and cannibalism.
Jerry Brudos: was a shoe fetishist, serial killer, rapist, torturer and necrophiliac who stalked women around Portland, Oregon in 1968 and 1969.
John Robinson: the self-proclaimed Internet Slavemaster. A former acquaintance said John Edward Robinson may have been member of a cult involving bondage, rape and torture. According to the informant Robinson's job in their cult was to recruit women. These women were then raped and tortured.
Joseph Edward Duncan III: in Idaho, he killed Shasta Groene's parents, killed her brother and kept her for seven weeks before getting caught.
Larry Eyler: in his early 30's Eyler started picking up men under the guise of consensual sex, with a bit of bondage thrown in. Once he got the victims to a secluded area and handcuffed them, Eyler would brutally beat the victim, and then kill them. Most of his victims were found with their pants pulled down and disemboweled.
Marc Dutroux: in 1995 and 1996, kidnapped, tortured and sexually abused six girls, ranging in age from 8 to 19, four of whom died as a result.
Michel Fourniret: June and July 2004, kidnapped, raped and murdered nine girls in a span of fourteen years during the 1980s and the 1990s.
Robert Black: he kidnapped, raped and murdered three girls during the 1980s, kidnapped a fourth girl who survived, attempted to kidnap a fifth, and is suspected of a number of unsolved child murders dating back to the 1970s.
Robert Hansen: he flew his victims into the Alaskan wilderness and hunted them down like wild game.
Westley Allan Dodd: all his victims (over 50 in all) were children below the age of 12, some of them as young as 2 years old. Dodd became more deranged the older he became (he wrote about wanting to eat the genitals of his victims). When he was arrested, the police found with him a homemade torture rack, as yet unused.
Edward Lanphear held two men naked and in chains in his garage.
Editor's note: this list was written in 2008 to 2009 and is reproduced as written. Several entries need the archive's own figures against them, and one is badly wrong. Westley Allan Dodd murdered three boys, not more than fifty; the higher number is his own count of children he molested, and running the two together turns a molestation total into a body count. Michel Fourniret's entry has its dates crossed: he was arrested in Belgium in June 2003 and convicted in May 2008 of seven murders and one killing he had ordered, over killings committed between the late 1980s and 2001, and he died in 2021. Elizabeth Bathory was never tried; her servants were, and three were executed, while she was confined at Csejte Castle by royal order until her death in 1614. The figures that survive testimony are thirty-seven to fifty-one, not the six hundred and fifty that comes from a single uncorroborated claim. H. H. Holmes was convicted of one murder, that of Benjamin Pitezel, and the Castle as this article describes it comes largely from a confession he sold to a newspaper for a reported seven and a half thousand dollars. Gertrude Baniszewski is here for a single victim, Sylvia Likens, and is not a serial case on this archive's definition. On the others the archive records: Berdella six, pleaded guilty, died in prison in 1992; Charlene Gallego served sixteen years under a plea agreement and was released in 1997; Rhoades three to four, life without parole in 1992; Gerard Schaefer two convictions, stabbed to death in his cell in 1995; Glatman executed in 1959; Brudos three, died 2006; Duncan died of brain cancer at Terre Haute in 2021; Eyler two convictions with twenty-one or more attributed; Dutroux three murder convictions in 2004; Robert Black four convictions, died at HMP Maghaberry in 2016; Hansen four convictions, seventeen confessed, died in 2014. Maury Travis had already written to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, so the article's "before confessing" is not quite right; he hanged himself in a county jail on June 10, 2002, before trial. This archive has no roster entry for Gary Heidnik, Gertrude Baniszewski, Westley Allan Dodd or Edward Lanphear; Heidnik has his own article on the site.