A nickname is a small act of publishing. Somebody has to write it down first, and somebody has to decide that readers will recognize it. In the nine cases here, the first hand belonged to a letter writer who may have been a journalist, to three more letter writers who named themselves, to a reporter at a Los Angeles weekly, to local editors in Georgia and in Artvin, to the Turkish national press, and to the newspapers of a German city on the Rhine. One name was taken up by a different murderer, who used it to bargain with a police chief. The names outlived almost everyone who coined them, and in several cases they shaped what the police, the public and the victims' families were told.
The name "Jack the Ripper" came from a letter. Dated September 25, 1888, and received at the Central News Agency in London on September 27, it was signed with that name. The agency took it for a joke and forwarded it to Scotland Yard on September 29. The next night two more women died, and the police, after the double murder, had copies of the letter made public. The name stuck. On the morning of October 1 the agency received a postcard in the same hand, smeared with what looked like blood, that referred to a "double event" and was published at once.
Because the postcard seemed to know of the night’s events, it was long taken as a sign of authenticity. It proves little. News of the two murders was all over London by the afternoon of September 30, and the Victorian post ran collections even on Sundays. Sir Robert Anderson and Sir Melville Macnaghten both wrote later that they believed the letters were the work of a journalist, and that is still the majority view. If it is right, the most durable name in the history of crime was written by someone who sold news and then released to the public by the police.
What the police were investigating was something broader and vaguer. Their inquiry into the "Whitechapel murders" took in eleven deaths between April 1888 and February 1891, and how many of them belong to one man is still disputed. Five are called canonical: Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols, 43; Annie Chapman, 47; Elizabeth Stride, 44; Catherine Eddowes, 46; and Mary Jane Kelly, about 25. They died between August 31 and November 9, 1888. A signature on a letter turned that uncertain list into a single author with a persona. For more than a century the five women were described, in police files and in almost everything written since, in terms that the historian Hallie Rubenhold’s 2019 research, as Smithsonian summarized it, does not support. The persona received more attention than the people.
The case ended without an arrest. Sir Charles Warren, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, resigned on November 8, the eve of Kelly’s death. On November 10 the government, which had refused rewards all autumn, offered a pardon to any accomplice, other than the person responsible, who came forward. No one did. No one has ever been charged.
David Berkowitz shot 13 people in eight shootings in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn between July 1976 and July 1977, and six of them died. For most of that time the press called the unidentified gunman after the caliber of his weapon, the ".44 Caliber Killer," a label that described the evidence rather than the man. He supplied his own name in writing.
After the shooting of Valentina Suriani, 18, and Alexander Esau, 20, on April 17, 1977, police recovered a letter addressed to Captain Joseph Borrelli of the NYPD. Its writer denied hating women and called himself "Son of Sam." Time reported in 1977 that the letter spoke of a father figure named Sam who directed him. The name reached the newspapers and stayed. A second letter went to the columnist Jimmy Breslin, which gave the gunman the one thing a police task force could not offer him, a byline-sized audience.
By midsummer the case dominated New York. Time reported in August 1977 that 75 detectives and 225 uniformed officers were assigned full time, that about 700 more had volunteered off duty, and that the task force center in Queens sometimes logged more than 100 calls an hour. Police collected at least 5,000 names to check. Women named husbands, former boyfriends and co-workers. Witness sketches did not resemble one another and sent people after the wrong men. Young women across the city cut or dyed their hair and stayed home at night. The pattern behind that fear was less tidy than the newspapers made it; Time counted six shootings in parked cars and noted that some of the women did not have long dark hair.
Berkowitz was arrested in Yonkers on August 10, 1977. On May 8, 1978, he pleaded guilty to six counts of second-degree murder, with attempted murder, assault and weapons counts for seven people who were wounded, and on June 12 he was sentenced to the maximum of 25 years to life on each murder count. He has been refused parole at every hearing since 2002, most recently, as of May 2024, at his twelfth.
The name had a legal afterlife he did not control. The "Son of Sam" law, a New York statute written to keep criminals from profiting from accounts of their crimes, was reviewed by the United States Supreme Court in 1991, and in 2006 Berkowitz himself moved to use it against a former lawyer over a book. He has said he hates the name. In a 2017 interview with CBS News he said, "That was a demon." In prison he took another one, "Son of Hope."
The Zodiac named himself, and the record says so. On August 4, 1969, the San Francisco Examiner turned over to the Vallejo police an anonymous letter it had received, according to FBI records released in the bureau’s online Vault. It opened with a line he would use for years: "This is the Zodiac speaking." The Examiner later noted that the name was coined in a 1969 letter to the paper.
Police attribute five killings and two woundings to one unidentified man in four episodes in the northern Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969. Between and after them he telephoned police and mailed letters and ciphers to newspapers, demanding that they be printed. The editors who ran them were not inventing a nickname. They were handing a stranger the front page he asked for.
The letters slowed, then returned. In January 1974 came the first letter to the authorities in almost three years. According to Cox Media Group’s 2018 summary of the case, it ended with a tally: "Me 37, SFPD 0." In 1978 another letter arrived, and within months the lead San Francisco detective, Dave Toschi, was off the case. The Associated Press, reporting his death in January 2018 at age 86, said he had been removed after admitting that he had written anonymous letters praising his own work.
The writing kept its power long after the writer went silent. In December 2020 three amateur codebreakers announced the solution of a cipher mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle 51 years earlier, as CBS News reported, and the solution, set out in a 2024 paper by David Oranchak, Sam Blake and Jarl Van Eycke, still gave no name. San Francisco police declared the case inactive in 2004 and reopened it before March 2007, and as of October 2026 no charge or official identification had been reported. The name, at least, was never in doubt. The writer chose it, and it is the one thing in the file that did not need a witness.
Dennis Rader killed 10 people in and around Wichita, Kansas, between January 1974 and January 1991. He wrote to the police and the press, gave himself the initials BTK, which he explained in his own letters, and asked why the newspapers were not paying him more attention. For most of those years he was a married father of two, an alarm installer and later a municipal code officer in Park City, a Cub Scout leader and the president of his church council. No one had named him as a suspect before 2005.
A package that reached a Wichita television station in 1979 was followed by silence, and BTK did not write again for 25 years. In March 2004 he mailed The Wichita Eagle proof that he had killed a woman whose death had never been linked to him, and in the months that followed he sent package after package to police and broadcasters. In one of them he asked, through a classified advertisement, whether a computer disk could be traced. The police answered with the words "Rex, it will be OK," and he mailed one. On February 16, 2005, a padded envelope reached KSAS-TV in Wichita, with a letter signed "PJ Fox," a piece of jewelry and a floppy disk.
The disk led back to him. Rader had given the same disk to his own pastor, Michael Clark, in January, the Associated Press reported, saying it held an agenda for a church council meeting. Investigators established that the data on it pointed to Christ Lutheran Church and carried the name "Dennis." A Google search showed that the president of the congregation was Dennis Rader. He was arrested on February 25, 2005, charged on March 1 with 10 counts of first-degree murder, and pleaded guilty on June 27. On August 18, 2005, District Judge Gregory Waller sentenced him to 10 consecutive life terms, with a minimum of 175 years before parole eligibility.
The appetite for attention that produced the name also produced the disk that identified him.
Between 1985 and 2007, nine women and a 15-year-old girl died in South Los Angeles. For more than two decades no one was charged. The families of several of the women did not learn until 2008 that police had linked their daughters' deaths to one man.
The press called him the "Grim Sleeper." The name came from the crime reporter Christine Pelisek of LA Weekly, who learned of the secret task force in 2008. She and her editor, Jill Stewart, gave the killer the name for an apparent gap in the killings between 1988 and 2002, the Columbia Journalism Review reported. The police had resisted going public, fearing they would scare him off. Pelisek argued it was a matter of public safety. The Review gave her one of its "Laurels" in 2010 for her reporting and her advocacy for the victims.
The name described a pause that investigators later came to doubt. Prosecutors said at the penalty phase of Lonnie Franklin Jr.'s trial that Georgia Mae Thomas was killed in 2000, in the middle of the supposed sleep, and police came to believe he never stopped. He was never charged with her death. The name that first made the case public was wrong about the one thing it claimed to say.
Franklin, a former city sanitation worker and police garage attendant who worked as a mechanic, was arrested on July 7, 2010, after a familial DNA search of the California state data bank pointed to a relative. On May 5, 2016, a Los Angeles jury convicted him of 10 counts of first-degree murder with the special circumstance of multiple murder and one count of attempted murder. He was sentenced to death on August 10, 2016, and died at San Quentin on March 28, 2020, with his automatic appeal still pending.
In 1929 Düsseldorf lived through a series of killings by someone no one could identify. Newspapers called the unknown killer the Vampire of Düsseldorf, a name that tells more about the readers than about the man. A leading Berlin detective, Ernst Gennat, came to support the Düsseldorf police. More than a hundred clairvoyants offered their services, A. A. Friedländer reported in 1931, and all of them failed.
Martin Rath, writing for Legal Tribune Online, says that it was Gennat who coined, in connection with these crimes, the German word "Serienmörder," serial murderer. If Rath is right, the same case produced two terms, one for the public and one for the police, and only the second became a working vocabulary. Peter Kürten was traced in 1930 after a woman who survived one of his assaults led investigators to his address, according to the German Press Agency, and after he confessed to his wife. A Düsseldorf court convicted him on April 22, 1931, of murder in nine cases and attempted murder in seven. He was executed at Cologne on July 2, 1931.
Adnan Çolak admitted killing eleven elderly people in the province of Artvin, in northeastern Turkey, between 1992 and 1995. The people he killed were between 68 and 95 years old, according to the national papers Milliyet and Posta. He was caught after an assault in which the person he meant to kill survived. The Zonguldak 1st Heavy Penal Court sentenced him to death six times, with a long prison term on top.
The investigation went slowly. According to Gazete Vatan, the gendarmerie and the police did not connect the killings to one another, even though they followed the same pattern. Local newspapers gave the unknown offender a name, Artvin Canavarı, and, according to the researcher Sevinç Yavuz, called him nothing else. Canavar is the Turkish word for a wild beast. Yavuz argued in her interview that Turkish culture tends to describe a man who kills again and again as a beast rather than as a serial offender, a habit of speech that treats such a man as an animal and not as a pattern to be investigated. She had asked the Turkish National Police for a list of the country’s serial killers and was given six names. Çolak was not among them.
He did not stay in prison. Posta and Gazete Vatan reported in 2018 that he was released on May 28, 2005, under the conditional release provision popularly called the "Rahşan affı," Law No. 4616 of December 21, 2000. Which of the eleven killings each sentence covered has not been reported.
Ali Kaya, from Gaziantep in southeastern Turkey, was sentenced to five years for killing his uncle in 1997. Turkish newspapers later linked him to as many as ten killings. The reports differ on the total, and for most of them no verdict was reported; Milliyet says he was acquitted in the Alanya cases. The Turkish press called him "bebek yüzlü katil," the baby-faced killer. Milliyet’s account of the nickname is simple: it came from his young age and innocent face. Posta’s 2023 telling ties the name’s hold on him to a later killing.
He escaped from Gaziantep H-type prison on January 5, 2014. Hürriyet Daily News headlined the story with the nickname the next day, and Hürriyet’s headline on March 3, 2014, when he was recaptured in Gaziantep, did the same. Milliyet quoted psychiatrists in 2014 who said he had a tendency to go on killing until stopped. Posta reported in August 2023 that he was still in prison.
The record behind the name is thinner than the name. One conviction is reported, for the 1997 killing of his uncle. The rest are attributions by the press, and a nickname of this kind can carry a whole biography that no court has examined.
In Columbus, Georgia, the local press called the unknown offender of 1977 and 1978 the "Stocking Strangler," a phrase the Georgia Attorney General’s office and the federal appeals court later recorded for the whole series. Carlton Gary was convicted in August 1986 of killing three women in Columbus in the autumn and winter of 1977: Florence Scheible, 89; Martha Thurmond, 69; and Kathleen Woodruff, 74. A Muscogee County jury convicted him on three counts each of malice murder, rape and burglary, and he was sentenced to death. Prosecutors told the jury that one man had targeted nine older women in Columbus between September 1977 and April 1978, seven of whom died, and that he was Gary. He was never charged with the other four deaths. After the series ended he robbed restaurants in South Carolina and was known there as the "Steakhouse Bandit," the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The Georgia authorities executed him on March 15, 2018. He denied the killings for more than 30 years.
The name figures in a second case. In March 1978, while the series was still unsolved, Columbus police received letters signed by a group calling itself "The Forces of Evil." Five went to Police Chief McClung and one to a local newspaper. They claimed that a white organization had seized two Black women and would kill them unless the police caught the "stocking strangler," whom the letters described as terrorizing the white women of the city, according to the federal appeals court that later reviewed the matter.
The writer was William Henry Hance, a soldier at Fort Benning. The court held that he had killed Gail Jackson, also known as Brenda Gail Faison, on or about February 28, 1978, and Irene Thirkield on March 15, 1978. On April 4 he went to Army investigators' headquarters, and on April 5 he signed statements about both. Hance was convicted of the murder of Gail Jackson and sentenced to death. A federal court ordered a new sentencing hearing in 1983, and he was sentenced to death again.
The letters used the newspaper’s phrase as leverage, which is a kind of tribute: by March 1978 the name was known well enough to be traded.
Four of the nine names began in a letter: Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, Zodiac and BTK, the first of them, on the majority view, written by a reporter. Five began in a newsroom: the Grim Sleeper, the Vampire of Düsseldorf, the Beast of Artvin, the baby-faced killer and the Stocking Strangler. The letter writers wanted to be read, and the newspapers obliged them. The newsrooms did not know the men they were naming, and the names recorded what readers feared.
Two of the nine names, Jack the Ripper and Zodiac, still have no one behind them. Berkowitz says he hates his. The Grim Sleeper’s was wrong about the gap it described. The rest are labels that a few editors and a century of readers agreed to keep.
• August 31 to November 9, 1888: the five canonical Whitechapel murders.
• September 27, 1888: the Central News Agency receives the letter signed "Jack the Ripper."
• November 8 to 10, 1888: Warren resigns; the government offers a pardon to an accomplice; no one comes forward.
• 1913 and 1929: killings later tried against Peter Kürten in Mülheim and Düsseldorf.
• December 1968 to October 1969: the five killings that police attribute to the Zodiac.
• August 4, 1969: the Examiner passes the first "Zodiac" letter to the Vallejo police.
• January 1974: first Zodiac letter in almost three years, ending "Me 37, SFPD 0."
• July 1976 to July 1977: the Son of Sam shootings in New York.
• April 17, 1977: a letter addressed to Captain Borrelli introduces the name "Son of Sam."
• August 10, 1977: Berkowitz arrested in Yonkers.
• March 1978: letters signed "The Forces of Evil" invoke the "stocking strangler" in Columbus, Georgia.
• May 8, 1978: Berkowitz pleads guilty to six counts of second-degree murder.
• August 26, 1986: Carlton Gary convicted of three murders in Columbus.
• 1992 to 1995: the Artvin killings admitted by Adnan Çolak.
• 2004: Rader resurfaces with a package to The Wichita Eagle.
• February 25, 2005: Rader arrested; August 18, 2005, sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms.
• May 28, 2005: Çolak released under Law No. 4616, as reported in 2018.
• 2008: the name "Grim Sleeper" is coined at LA Weekly.
• July 7, 2010: Lonnie Franklin Jr. arrested.
• January 5, 2014: Ali Kaya leaves Gaziantep prison; recaptured March 3, 2014.
• August 10, 2016: Franklin sentenced to death.
• March 15, 2018: Carlton Gary executed in Georgia.
• March 28, 2020: Franklin dies at San Quentin.
• December 2020: the Zodiac 340 cipher is reported solved; it names no one.