Every list of the deadliest serial killers runs into the same problem: there is more than one way to count. A conviction is a number a court has tested. A confession is a number the killer chose to give, and killers both inflate and shrink their totals for their own reasons. An estimate is a number someone else has reasoned toward, from missing persons reports, from remains, from maps drawn in prison. The three can be far apart, and lists that mix them without saying so end up ranking boasts alongside proof.
This list ranks sixteen killers by the best-established figure we could find, and labels each one: conviction, inquiry finding or confession. Where there is a larger confessed or estimated total, it is given separately. The numbers come from court records, official inquiries and contemporary news reports, which are listed at the end.
The numbers also move. Mikhail Popkov’s convictions rose from twenty-two to eighty-three over eight years as he led investigators to remains. Samuel Little went from three convictions to some sixty confirmed killings after he started talking to a Texas Ranger. Investigators are still identifying Gary Ridgway’s victims more than twenty years after his plea, and in 2025 Alexander Pichushkin offered to confess to eleven more. Any list like this one is a snapshot, and the date on it matters.
Moses Sithole was born on November 17, 1964, in Vosloorus, near Boksburg, in what is now Gauteng province, South Africa, one of five children of Simon and Sophie Sithole. After his father died, his mother left the children at a police station, and they were placed in an orphanage in KwaZulu-Natal, where, by Biography.com’s account, they were abused. He ran away in his teens to an older brother and later worked in the gold mines around Johannesburg. In 1989 he was sent to prison for six years for raping Buyiswa Doris Swakamisa, who had gone to the police; another woman, Patricia Khumalo, later testified that he had raped her in 1987. He was released early, in 1993.
In 1995 bodies of young Black women began turning up around Pretoria and the East Rand. Four were found near Atteridgeville, west of Pretoria, between January and April. On September 16, 1995, a body was found near an abandoned mine at Van Dyk outside Boksburg, and over the next forty-eight hours investigators recovered ten more from the area. Most of the women had gone to meet a man who had promised them a job. Investigators brought in the retired FBI profiler Robert Ressler. On October 3 a man called The Star newspaper claiming to be the killer, and he knew details that had not been published.
On October 18, 1995, undercover officers intercepted Sithole as he tried to contact relatives. He resisted and was shot in the leg and stomach, and while he recovered in the military hospital in Pretoria he confessed to many of the killings. His trial opened on October 21, 1996. Prosecutors played a video recorded in jail in which he admitted twenty-nine murders. On December 4, 1997, he was found guilty of thirty-eight murders, forty rapes and six robberies. The judge said he would have imposed death without hesitation, but South Africa had abolished capital punishment in 1995. Sithole was sentenced to 2,410 years, with no parole for at least 930, and is held in the maximum-security section of Pretoria Central Prison.
Alexander Pichushkin killed most of his victims in Bitsa Park, a large wooded park in southern Moscow, and the Russian press called him the Bitsa Maniac. He lived in a nearby apartment with his mother. Many of the people he killed were homeless men, alcoholics or elderly; he would offer them vodka and ask them to drink with him in memory of his dead dog. Most were thrown, drunk, into the park’s sewage pits. Others were strangled or struck on the head. In 2001 alone he killed eleven people, six of them in a single month. From 2005 he stopped hiding the bodies.
In February 2006, after newspapers reported wrongly that the Bitsa Maniac had been caught, he killed again, apparently to prove he was still free. In June 2006 he killed a woman who had left a note saying she was going for a walk with him. He knew about the note and killed her anyway. “I burned myself,” he said later, “so there’s no need for the cops to take credit for catching me.” In his apartment police found a chessboard with its squares numbered up to sixty-two. He claimed sixty-three killings and said he had hoped to fill all sixty-four squares.
At his trial in 2007, held in a glass cage, he called himself “a professional.” On October 24, 2007, after less than three hours of deliberation, a Moscow jury convicted him of forty-eight murders and three attempted murders; prosecutors had not been able to prove the rest. Psychiatrists at Russia’s main forensic clinic had found him sane. Because of Russia’s moratorium on executions, he was sentenced to life, with psychiatric treatment in prison. He is held at the Polar Owl prison in the Arctic north. In April 2025 the Russian penal service said he was ready to confess to eleven more killings, which, if proven, would make him the second most prolific convicted killer in Russia’s records.
Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, is the American with the highest number of murder convictions. In July 1982 children found the body of sixteen-year-old Wendy Coffield in the Green River, south of Seattle, and four more bodies were found in the weeks that followed. King County formed the Green River Task Force that August. Most of the women Ridgway killed in the 1980s were young, and many were runaways or worked on the streets of Seattle’s southern suburbs, which is part of why he was able to keep killing.
Police questioned Ridgway in April 1983 about a missing woman, Marie Malvar, and he denied knowing her; in May 1984 he passed a polygraph. In 1986 a task force detective even consulted Ted Bundy, then on death row, who suggested the killer might be going back to the bodies. In 1987 he gave detectives a saliva sample, but the DNA testing of the day could not use it. In 2001 improved testing tied that sample to some of the victims, and on November 30, 2001, police announced his arrest for four of the earliest killings: Marcia Chapman, Opal Mills, Cynthia Hinds and Carol Ann Christensen.
On November 5, 2003, under an agreement that spared him the death penalty in exchange for his help finding remains, he pleaded guilty to forty-eight counts of aggravated first-degree murder. “I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight,” he said. He received forty-eight consecutive life terms. In February 2011 he pleaded guilty to a forty-ninth murder, that of Rebecca Marrero, a twenty-year-old mother last seen in 1982 whose remains had been found in a ravine in Auburn. “I don’t agree with this plea deal to spare his pathetic life,” her sister Mary said in court. Ridgway has claimed as many as eighty killings. In December 2023 the King County Sheriff’s Office identified another of his victims, Lori Anne Razpotnik, who disappeared at fifteen in 1982.
Anatoly Onoprienko was born in Ukraine on July 25, 1959. In 1989, with an accomplice, Serhiy Rogozin, he killed a family of seven, two adults and five children, in a robbery near the village of Bratkovychi. Then, as far as the record shows, he stopped for six years.
From December 1995 to March 1996 he killed again, at a pace no one in Ukraine had seen. He went from village to village in western and central Ukraine, killing whole households and often killing neighbors or passers-by who might have seen him. The victims included the Pilat family of Bratkovychi, two adults and three children, and two witnesses, on January 17, 1996; a young mother and her two sons in Fastiv on January 30; and the Bodnarchuk family, with children aged seven and eight, and a neighbor, on February 27. He was arrested on April 16, 1996.
His trial opened in Zhytomyr in November 1998. He told investigators that voices had told him to kill and said in court that he had once been treated in a psychiatric hospital. President Leonid Kuchma said in an interview, “As a human being, I cannot see any punishment for him other than death,” which Amnesty International criticized as interference with the court. Amnesty also raised the case of a man arrested in Lviv in 1996 over killings later attributed to Onoprienko, who was reportedly tortured to death during interrogation, and another who was sentenced to death for related murders and freed only after Onoprienko’s arrest. On March 31, 1999, Onoprienko was convicted of fifty-two murders and sentenced to death. Because of Ukraine’s moratorium on executions, the sentence became life imprisonment. He died of a heart attack in prison in Zhytomyr on August 27, 2013, aged fifty-four.
Andrei Chikatilo was born on October 16, 1936. A former schoolteacher and Communist Party member, he killed between December 1978 and November 1990, most of the time in and around Rostov-on-Don and Novocherkassk, and also in other Soviet cities including Leningrad, Tashkent and Sverdlovsk. His first known victim was nine-year-old Lena Zakotnova, killed on December 22, 1978.
For years the Soviet police did not accept that one man was responsible. At first they attributed thirty-six cases to the killer they were hunting. The investigator Viktor Burakov asked the psychiatrist Aleksandr Bukhanovsky to draw up a profile. Chikatilo was arrested on November 20, 1990, after more suspicious behavior, and at first refused to admit anything. Burakov then let Bukhanovsky talk with him, presenting it as a scientific effort to understand him. Chikatilo, apparently flattered, began to describe the killings in detail and led police to bodies that had not been found.
He claimed fifty-six victims; prosecutors could verify fifty-three, and his trial on those charges opened on April 14, 1992. He sat in an iron cage that kept him apart from the victims’ families, and his behavior swung from boredom to outbursts of singing and nonsense. On October 15, 1992, he was found guilty of fifty-two murders, twenty-one boys, fourteen girls and seventeen young women, and sentenced to death. His appeal, which argued that the psychiatric finding that he was fit for trial was biased, failed, and President Boris Yeltsin rejected his plea for clemency. He was shot in a prison near Rostov on February 14, 1994, aged fifty-seven.
Pedro Alonso López was born in Santa Isabel, Colombia, on October 8, 1948, during the years of political violence known as La Violencia, and grew up partly on the streets of Bogotá. In the 1970s he began abducting and killing girls in Peru. Members of an Ayacucho community caught him trying to take a nine-year-old and were preparing to kill him when a Western missionary persuaded them to hand him to the police, who deported him to Colombia. He moved on to Ecuador, where girls began to disappear.
In 1980 market vendors in Ambato, Ecuador, caught him trying to lure a girl away. An investigator, Pastor Córdova Gudiño, posed as a fellow prisoner, gained his trust, and obtained a confession and the locations of graves. Police recovered the bodies of fifty-seven girls (some reports say fifty-three). He was charged with 110 murders and claimed about two hundred more in Peru and Colombia. On July 31, 1981, he pleaded guilty to fifty-seven killings. Ecuador’s maximum sentence was then sixteen years; the country later raised it to twenty-five.
He was released from García Moreno prison in Quito on August 31, 1994, two years early, and deported to Colombia. There he was charged with an old murder, found insane and held in a psychiatric hospital. In February 1998 he was declared sane and released on fifty dollars’ bail. He has not been seen since. Colombian authorities later raised concerns about a possible link to a 2002 murder. Whether he is alive is unknown.
Samuel Little confessed to more murders than anyone in American history. He was arrested in Kentucky in 2012 on a drug charge, and DNA linked him to three killings in Los Angeles between 1987 and 1989. He was convicted of those three in 2014. In 2018, after he pleaded guilty in Texas to the 1994 death of Denise Christie Brothers, he began talking to Texas Ranger James Holland, who interviewed him for about seven hundred hours.
Little confessed to ninety-three killings across the country between 1970 and 2005. His victims were women, killed in many states over thirty-five years. “For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims,” the FBI analyst Christie Palazzolo said in 2019, when the bureau announced it had verified fifty of his confessions. By the time of his death investigators had confirmed nearly sixty. “Nothing he’s ever said has been proven to be wrong or false,” Holland said. Little told 60 Minutes: “I think I’m the only one in the world. And that’s not an honor, that is a curse.” He died in a California hospital on December 30, 2020, aged eighty.
Yang Xinhai, also known as Yang Zhiya, was a drifter from the Zhumadian area of Henan province with earlier prison terms for burglary and rape. Between 2000 and 2003 he moved through four provinces, often by bicycle, breaking into homes at night and killing the people inside as they slept, with an axe, a hammer or a shovel. Many of his victims were members of the same family. Police gave robbery and rape as his motives.
He was arrested in Cangzhou, Hebei province, in November 2003, and soon confessed to sixty-five murders, twenty-three rapes and five other serious attacks: forty-nine of the murders in Henan, eight in Hebei, six in Anhui and two in Shandong. The Luohe City Intermediate People’s Court in Henan convicted him of sixty-seven murders and sentenced him to death. He told police that if he had not been caught he would have moved on to Tianjin, a city of ten million near Beijing, and perhaps to the capital itself. He did not appeal. He was executed on February 14, 2004, aged thirty-five, about two weeks after he was sentenced.
Kampatimar Shankariya killed in Rajasthan, in northwest India, in 1977 and 1978, and is reported to have killed more than seventy people. He attacked with a hammer, striking below the ear, and the name he became known by refers to that blow. He was arrested in late 1978, aged twenty-six, and hanged in Jaipur on May 16, 1979. His last words are reported as “I have murdered in vain” and “Nobody should become like me.” Shankariya’s case is poorly documented outside India, and the figure of seventy cannot be checked against a court record available in English. It is ranked here on the strength of the reported count, and it is the weakest number on this list.
Daniel Camargo Barbosa was born in Anolaima, Cundinamarca, Colombia, around 1930. In Colombia, with a partner named Esperanza, he drugged and sexually abused girls, and both were convicted; he later raped and strangled a young woman and was sent to the island prison of Gorgona with a twenty-five-year sentence. On November 23, 1984, he escaped, swimming underwater to the dock and boarding a supply boat. Colombia declared him dead.
He crossed into Ecuador in December 1984, settled in Guayaquil selling pens on the street, and killed girls and young women in and around Guayaquil, Quevedo, Machala and Quito. He was caught in Quito carrying a bag of bloodied clothing from his last victim. He confessed to seventy-one killings in Ecuador, and some later estimates put his total across both countries above 150. In 1986 he was sentenced to sixteen years, the maximum Ecuador allowed. He argued afterward that if the Colombian authorities had treated him properly, his Ecuadorian victims would have lived. He showed no remorse. In November 1994 another prisoner, a relative of one of his victims, killed him in prison. He was buried in a common grave in Quito.
Pedro Rodrigues Filho, known in Brazil as Pedrinho Matador, was convicted of seventy-one homicides and given sentences totaling four hundred years. He said he first felt the urge to kill at thirteen, and at fourteen he killed the vice-mayor of Alfenas, in Minas Gerais. He was first arrested in May 1973, at nineteen, and most of the men he killed afterward were fellow prisoners. He also killed his own father in prison, and said he was proud of it. He claimed about a hundred killings in all and had “mato por prazer,” “I kill for pleasure,” tattooed on his body.
He was released in 2007 after more than three decades inside, arrested again in 2011 for riot and false imprisonment, and later released again. In his last years he ran a YouTube channel under the name “Pedrinho ex-matador com Jesus,” with more than twenty thousand subscribers, and had more than two hundred thousand followers on the video app Kwai. On March 5, 2023, he was shot dead outside a house in Mogi das Cruzes, in São Paulo state, aged sixty-eight. The killers have not been publicly identified.
Mikhail Popkov was a police officer in Angarsk, a city in Siberia near Irkutsk, and after he retired from the force in 1998, a security guard. Between 1992 and 2010, by the prosecution’s account, he offered women rides late at night, sometimes in a police car while off duty, drove them to secluded places and killed them with axes, hammers, knives or screwdrivers. Most were between sixteen and forty. One victim was a man, a fellow police officer. The Russian press called him the Werewolf and the Angarsk Maniac.
The killings went unsolved for years. In 2012 investigators reopened the cases and turned to DNA, concentrating on men who drove the make of car whose tire tracks had been found at the scenes. That led them to Popkov, who was detained in the Russian Far East. He later took investigators to the scenes and to burial sites. He described himself as a “cleaner” ridding the town of prostitutes, said he had chosen women who were drunk or living in ways he judged immoral, and linked the killings to his suspicion that his wife was unfaithful. The lead investigator, Yevgeny Karchevsky, rejected that story. Most of the victims, he said, were ordinary women with families: “He wasn’t cleaning up the town from sin; that was made up by the media.”
In January 2015 Popkov was sentenced to life for twenty-two murders. On December 10, 2018, he was convicted of fifty-six more and given a second life sentence; a prosecutor spoke of his “phenomenal ability to recall minute details of his crimes,” the clothes, tattoos and jewelry his victims had worn, which let investigators exhume victims killed fifteen to twenty years earlier. In 2021 he was convicted of two more murders committed in 1995, and in November 2023 of three more. By Novaya Gazeta’s itemized count of those sentences, the total stands at eighty-three; some foreign wire reports still give seventy-eight, the total after 2018. After his first conviction he confessed to about sixty more crimes, fifty-nine of them murders, and not all of those have been tried.
Niels Högel was a nurse. He worked at a hospital in Oldenburg, in northern Germany, from 1999 to 2002, and at a hospital in nearby Delmenhorst from 2003 to 2005. Over those years he injected patients in his care with overdoses of heart medication and other drugs to bring on cardiac arrest, and then tried to bring them back. He told the court he enjoyed the feeling of resuscitating them. Many of the people he killed were not dying. Prosecutors said that many were recovering.
He was first convicted in 2015, of two murders and two attempted murders, and given life. At trial he said he had deliberately caused cardiac crises in about ninety patients at Delmenhorst, and he later told investigators he had killed patients at Oldenburg too. Police and prosecutors went through more than five hundred patient files and hundreds of hospital records, and exhumed 134 bodies from sixty-seven cemeteries. The second trial, on one hundred counts of murder, ran for seven months in Oldenburg. Högel admitted forty-three of the killings, disputed five and said he could not remember fifty-two. “I am really sorry,” he told the court, and in his closing statement he apologized to every relative present.
On June 6, 2019, the presiding judge, Sebastian Bührmann, convicted him of eighty-five murders of patients aged thirty-four to ninety-six, acquitted him of fifteen for lack of evidence, and sentenced him to life, with a finding of particular seriousness that makes release after the usual fifteen years all but impossible. “Your guilt is incomprehensible,” the judge said. He told the court he had at times felt like “an accountant of death,” and admitted that the court had not been able to see through all of “the fog” over the case. With the 2015 verdict, Högel stands convicted of killing at least eighty-seven patients, the highest number for any killer in modern Germany. The true total may be higher. Of the hundred deaths he was tried for, he said he could not remember fifty-two, and the court could convict only where the evidence still allowed it.
Javed Iqbal’s count is the most unusual on this list, and it carries a label. He was convicted of one hundred murders, but the case against him rested to a large degree on his own words and on evidence he chose to hand over.
In late November 1999 Iqbal, a Lahore man in his late thirties, sent letters to the police and a newspaper saying that he had sexually abused and killed one hundred boys and dissolved their bodies in barrels of acid. A national manhunt followed. At a house on Ravi Road in Lahore police found two skeletons in an acid-filled container, at least nine bags of children’s clothing and shoes, a diary and a thirty-two-page notebook describing the killings. By his account, he and his accomplices had picked up teenage boys at the Data Sahib shrine and elsewhere in the city and taken them to the house. Families of almost all the hundred boys came to the Ravi Road police station and recognized photographs, shoes and clothes. One accomplice, Ishaq, known as Billa, died in police custody on December 7, 1999, after reportedly jumping from a third-floor window. On December 30, 1999, Iqbal walked into the office of an Urdu newspaper and surrendered.
His trial before Additional Sessions Judge Allah Bukhsh Ranjha began on February 8, 2000. He pleaded not guilty and changed his story more than once, at times saying the boys were alive and at times that he had acted in revenge for injustice done to him. On March 16, 2000, he was sentenced to death on one hundred counts. The judge ordered that he be strangled in front of the victims’ families with the chain he had used, and his body cut up and dissolved in acid. The Lahore High Court referred his appeal to the Shariat Court. On October 9, 2001, he and a condemned accomplice, Sajid, were found hanged in adjoining cells in Kot Lakhpat jail. The jail said they had killed themselves. Investigators doubted that two men could do so at the same time, and doctors reported marks of strangulation and old injuries on Iqbal’s body. His brothers declined to claim it. How many of the hundred boys he killed is a question his conviction answers on paper. The physical evidence the police recovered could not fully answer it.
Luis Alfredo Garavito killed children across Colombia in the 1990s. Most were boys and girls from poor families, between eight and sixteen, whom he approached posing as a monk, a street vendor or a homeless man, offering money or gifts, and led away to remote places. From 1994 onward the bodies of 114 children were found in fifty-nine Colombian towns.
He was arrested in April 1999 on an attempted rape charge, and investigators from the Fiscalía tied him to the killings. At a court hearing that year he said: “I want to ask for forgiveness for everything I did and I am going to confess.” “Yes, I killed them and not only those, I killed others,” he said. He confessed to raping and killing about 182 children, and later counts of his confessions run above 190. He was convicted of 143 of the killings, with sentences adding up to 1,853 years. Colombian law capped the time actually served at forty years, and reductions for confessing and helping to find remains raised the prospect of his release; his case helped justify tougher penalties that bar such reductions. Ecuador asked for his extradition over two killings there, and Colombia refused because of the scale of his crimes at home. His request for parole was refused in 2021. He died of cancer in a clinic in Valledupar on October 12, 2023, aged sixty-six, still in custody.
Harold Shipman was a family doctor. He began practicing in 1974 in Todmorden, West Yorkshire, and in 1977 joined a group practice in Hyde, a working-class town of about twenty-two thousand people near Manchester. In 1992 he set up on his own there. His patients trusted him and welcomed him into their homes, though some remembered flashes of arrogance and cruelty. His first known victim was Eva Lyons, a seventy-year-old with cancer, who died in Todmorden in March 1975.
His killing went unnoticed for more than twenty years. In March 1998 another doctor, whom Shipman had asked to countersign cremation certificates, became worried by how many of his patients were dying and went to the police. Their inquiry found too little to act on. Months later, a woman discovered that her eighty-one-year-old mother, one of Shipman’s patients, had apparently changed her will just before her death to leave everything to her doctor. That led to exhumations, and in January 2000 a jury convicted him of murdering fifteen elderly women patients, many in good health, with injections given during home visits or at his surgery. He was sentenced to life and never admitted anything.
A public inquiry, chaired by the High Court judge Dame Janet Smith, then examined the deaths of 494 people who had died in his care between 1974 and 1998. In July 2002 it concluded that he had killed at least 215 of them, 171 women and 44 men, aged from forty-one to ninety-three, mostly by lethal injection, starting in 1975. It found a “real suspicion” about forty-five more deaths, and too little information to decide on thirty-eight others. Smith wrote that he had betrayed his patients’ trust “in a way and to an extent that I believe is unparalleled in history.” She reached no clear conclusion about why he killed; money played a part in only one case, and she suggested he may have become addicted to killing. A later report by Smith found that if the 1998 police inquiry had been handled properly, his last three victims would have lived.
Prosecutors ruled out more trials. He hanged himself in his cell at Wakefield Prison in January 2004, aged fifty-seven. Kathleen Wood, whose eighty-three-year-old mother, Elizabeth Baddeley, he killed in 1997, said his death brought it all back, and that she wished he had admitted what he had done.
Shipman’s 215 is a different kind of number from Garavito’s 143. It is not a set of convictions. It is the finding of a judge-led inquiry that weighed the medical records and other evidence case by case and published its reasoning. That is a stronger basis than any killer’s own confession, which is why he heads this list.
Many lists include an Afghan man, usually called Abdul or Abul Djabar, said to have strangled sixty-five men and boys before he was hanged in Kabul in 1970. We could not find a contemporary newspaper report, court record or official statement for the case, only later lists repeating each other, so it is not ranked here. If a reliable record turns up, it will be added.
• March 1975: Harold Shipman’s first known killing, of Eva Lyons in Todmorden. • May 16, 1979: Kampatimar Shankariya hanged in Jaipur. • July 31, 1981: Pedro Alonso López pleads guilty to fifty-seven killings in Ecuador. • 1986: Daniel Camargo Barbosa sentenced in Ecuador after confessing to seventy-one killings. • October 15, 1992: Andrei Chikatilo convicted of fifty-two murders. • December 4, 1997: Moses Sithole convicted of thirty-eight murders. • March 31, 1999: Anatoly Onoprienko convicted of fifty-two murders. • January 2000: Shipman convicted of fifteen murders. • March 16, 2000: Javed Iqbal sentenced to death on one hundred counts in Lahore. • July 2002: The Shipman Inquiry finds he killed at least 215 patients. • November 5, 2003: Gary Ridgway pleads guilty to forty-eight murders; a forty-ninth follows in 2011. • February 2004: Yang Xinhai executed after conviction for sixty-seven murders. • October 24, 2007: Alexander Pichushkin convicted of forty-eight murders. • January 2015: Mikhail Popkov’s first conviction, for twenty-two murders. • 2019: The FBI says it has verified fifty of Samuel Little’s ninety-three confessions. • June 6, 2019: Niels Högel convicted of eighty-five more murders. • March 5, 2023: Pedro Rodrigues Filho shot dead in Mogi das Cruzes. • October 12, 2023: Luis Alfredo Garavito dies in custody; his convictions stand at 143. • November 2023: Popkov’s convictions reach eighty-three.
Several of the people on this list had something in common beyond the totals: they chose people whose deaths or disappearances were slow to be connected. Garavito’s victims were children from poor families, and Javed Iqbal’s were boys picked up around a Lahore shrine. Little believed, in the FBI’s words, that no one was accounting for his victims. Ridgway’s were young women on the margins of Seattle’s suburbs, and Pichushkin’s were homeless men and drinkers in a Moscow park. Shipman’s and Högel’s were patients whose deaths happened where deaths are expected, in the care of the men who caused them. Each count is a list of people, most of whose names never reached the papers.