OCCUPATIONS OF SERIAL KILLERS

Article BY CHRIS BARTHOLOMEW - Art by JEFFREY COX

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Even serial killers have to eat, pay bills, and live somewhere.  Here is a list of some serial killers and what they did to support their 'habit'.

Herbert Richard "Herb" Baumeister

Herbert Richard "Herb" Baumeister (April 7, 1947 - July 3, 1996) was the founder of the thrift store chain Sav-a-Lot and an alleged serial killer from suburban Westfield, Indiana.

In 1988 Baumeister founded the Sav-a-lot chain. The chain was a success and Baumeister became very rich. He also began spending a lot of time in homosexual bars in Indianapolis. He would bring men he picked up back to his mansion where he would strangle them and dispose of their bones in the woods behind his home.
Baumeister fled to Toronto and killed himself.

A search of his property uncovered the bones of 11 men. Baumeister was also suspected of killing nine more men and disposing of the bodies in rural areas between Indianapolis and Columbus.

Dr Marcel Petiot - The Butcher of Paris; Dr Satan

Dr Petiot was a respected doctor in Paris during the Second World War.
He was charged with the murder of 27 people, including Joachim Guschinow, M. and Mme Kneller, their son Rene Kneller, and Paul Braunberger between 1941 and 1944. Other sources suggest he killed 63 people, or even 150, and that the 86 dissected bodies pulled out of the Seine between 1941 and 1943 were also his handiwork.

Lured to his premises under the promise of a route out of German occupied France, his mostly Jewish victims would then be given a lethal injection, which he told them was to ward off foreign diseases on their travels. They would then be put into a small triangular room with extra thick walls, where Dr Petiot would watch them die through a small hole in the wall. Their bodies were then stored in a quick lime pit and later burned in a furnace.

Petiot was guillotined on 26th may 1946 in the Paris Sante Prison.

John Reginald Halliday Christie

John Reginald Halliday Christie was a 54 year old serial murderer and sexual psychopath who murdered at least 6 women. He also gave evidence at the trial of Timothy Evans, who was executed (later posthumously pardoned), for crimes almost certainly committed by Christie (who had served in the Army during World War One and been a Special Police Constable during the Second World War).

On the outbreak of World War II, he applied to join the police force and was accepted despite previous convictions.

He was arrested, tried, and hanged for murder in 1953.

Denis Nilsen

A British serial killer who lived in London. He is known to have killed at least 15 men between 1978 and 1983, when he was eventually caught after his disposal of a body blocked his household drains and drew the attention of the police.

In 1961, Nilsen left school and enlisted in the British Army where he became a cook. He served in the army for 11 years before leaving in 1972 and served briefly as a police officer. From the mid 1970s, Nilsen worked as a civil servant. He was active in the trade union movement.

Paul Kenneth Bernardo

Bernardo committed multiple sexual assaults, escalating in viciousness, in and around Ontario. Most of the assaults were on young women whom he had stalked after they had exited buses late in the evening.

Bernardo worked for Amway, whose sales culture had a deep effect on him. He bought the books and tapes of famous motivational get-rich-and-famous experts. Bernardo and his friends practiced their techniques on young women they met in bars.

Karla Leanne Homolka

Homolka is a Canadian serial killer who was convicted of manslaughter in the rape-murders of two teenaged girls; her husband, Paul Bernardo, was convicted of their murders and admitted having raped numerous women. Homolka and Bernardo also were responsible for the rape and death of her sister Tammy.

She worked part-time in a pet shop at a nearby mall. After receiving her grade 12 diploma in 1989, she was hired as a veterinary assistant a Veterinary Clinic, which asked her to leave after she was suspected of stealing drugs. She then found a similar job at the Martindale Animal Clinic.

Dr. Thomas Neill Cream

He was a Scotish-born serial killer, who claimed his first proven victims in the US and the rest in England. Cream, who poisoned his victims, was executed after his attempts to frame others for his crimes brought him to the attention of London police.

Cream went to Chicago and set up a medical practice not far from the red-light district, offering illegal abortions to prostitutes.

Unsubstantiated rumors suggested his last words as he was being hanged were confession that he was Jack the Ripper, even though he was in jail at the time of the Ripper murders.

William Patrick Fyfe

A Canadian serial killer convicted of killing five women in the Montreal area of Quebec, although he claims to have killed four others. He allegedly killed his first victim in 1979 at age of 24. He was raised by an aunt and moved from Western Canada to Montreal in 1958. As an adult, he worked as a handyman.

Robert William "Willie" Pickton

Pickton is a Canadian pig farmer and serial killer convicted of the second-degree murders of six women. He is also charged in the deaths of an additional twenty women, many of them prostitutes and drug users from Vancouver's Downtown.

He confessed to forty-nine murders to an undercover police officer posing as a cell mate. The Crown reported that Pickton told the officer that he wanted to kill another woman to make it an even 50, and that he was caught because he was "sloppy.

Pickton and his brother, David Francis Pickton, ran a registered charity called the Piggy Palace Good Times Society, a non-profit society whose official mandate was to organize, co-ordinate, manage and operate special events, functions, dances, shows and exhibitions on behalf of service organizations, sports organizations and other worthy groups.

Karl Denke

Denke was born in German. As an adult, he was well liked in his community, and worked as an organ player at the local church.

Denke was arrested after attacking a man at his house with an axe. Police searched Denke's home and found human flesh in huge jars of curing salts. A ledger contained the details of 40 people Denke had murdered and cannibalized over the years. It is thought he even sold the flesh of his victims at the market.

He hung himself in his jail cell.

He owned a rooming house and played an organ at his church.

Gwendolyn Graham & Cathy Wood

Both Gwendolyn Graham and Cathy Wood were Nurses aids at a retirement home. They are attributed five victims, and imprisoned for life.
John George Haigh

He Lived in Great Brittan. Haigh was an Accountant at an engineering firm, and hanged for his crimes, he is attributed six victims, but there were possibly nine.

Edmund Kemper

An American serial killer who lived in California, with 10 victims to his name.  He is serving a life sentence.  He was a Highway Department worker

Anna Maria Zwanziger

Zwangiger was a German serial killer with four victims.  She was a domestic servant.  She was beheaded for her crimes.

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo - Butcher of Rostov, The Red Ripper or The Rostov Ripper.

A notorious Russian serial killer, he was convicted of the murders of 52 women and children. He completed a degree in Russian literature by a correspondence course and tried a career as a teacher in. There were several complaints of him perpetrating child sexual abuse on his students that were usually handled quietly and without police involvement, thus he was able to move from school to school. He eventually took a job as a clerk for a factory, using his many business trips around the Soviet Union to carry out his killings.

John R. Gasser

Gasser was a student and state employee in Seattle.

Gasser raped and strangled a 22-year-old carhop and dumped her body near the Sand Point Naval Station. Years after his release from prison, he raped and strangled a 49-year-old woman and dumped her body in a ditch outside Olympia in 1982. He is in prison in Washington.

Harvy L. Carignan - The Want Ad Killer

He was a gas station manager is Seattle and Minneapolis.

Suspected in dozens of sex-slayings spanning four decades and several Western states and provinces, Carignan is thought to have killed at least two women in Washington. He was convicted of two murders in Minnesota. He met some victims by placing newspaper help wanted ads. A map found in his Minnesota home had at least 180 areas circled -- including 18 in Washington -- where some bodies have been found.

He is in prison in Minnesota.

James Dwight Canady

City water department employee, in Seattle

He abducted, raped and strangled two women, and then dumped their bodies near Stevens Pass. Canady later attacked two other women and was being held in King County Jail on rape, assault and kidnapping charges when he confessed to the murders, leading detectives to one body. He is in prison in Washington.

Warren Forrest

Clark County parks employee, in Vancouver.

Forrest is suspected of kidnapping, raping and strangling six women near Vancouver. He was convicted of killing one and abducting, raping and attempting to kill two others, after serving seven years in a state mental hospital. He is in prison in Washington.

Gary G. Grant

Navy enlistee, Renton

He confessed to four sex-slayings, including the murders of two 6-year-old boys and two teenage girls. All victims stabbed, strangled or both, then dumped in wooded areas near a Renton trailer park where he lived with his parents. He is in prison in Washington.

Ted Bundy

Law student, Tacoma

One of the most infamous serial killers of modern time, the former Tacoma man and University of Washington law student is thought to have killed at least 36 young women and girls in Washington, Oregon, California, Utah, Colorado and Florida.

He was executed in Florida in 1989.

James Elledg

Part-time church janitor 

He attacked at least four women over 33-year span, killing two. Crimes include a 1966 robbery/kidnapping in Albuquerque, N.M.; a 1974 bludgeoning murder in Seattle; and the1998 fatal stabbing of one woman and sexual assault of another in a Lynnwood church.

He was executed in Washington in 2001.

James Edward Ruzicka

Stable cleaner, Redmond

Deemed a sexual psychopath after attacking two Seattle women, he escaped Western State Hospital, then raped and strangled two teenagers in West Seattle. He hung the body of one victim from a tree and hid the other in a field. He was arrested in Oregon after raping a 13-year-old girl. He is in prison in Washington.

William Batten

Car lot worker, Aberdeen

He was committed to state psychiatric hospital as a sexual psychopath following child molestations in 1967. He stabbed two teenage hitchhikers to death near Moclips in 1975. He remains a suspect in the 1969 disappearance of a woman he had dated.

He is in prison in Washington.

Robert Lee Yates Jr.

Aluminum plant worker and Army Reserve helicopter pilot, Spokane.

He killed a string of prostitutes in Spokane and Pierce County since 1996. Admitted to 16 murders, convicted of 15. He would pick up prostitutes, shoot them and engage in post-mortem sex. Grew up on Whidbey Island and lived in several Washington cities.
He is on death row in Washington.

Kenneth Bianchi - The Hillside Strangler:

Security-alarm installer, Bellingham

Strangled at least seven women and left their bodies on hillsides in Los Angeles. He killed two Western Washington University students in Bellingham in 1979. He worked with an adopted "cousin" convicted of nine similar murders in Los Angeles.

He is in prison in Washington.

Morris Frampton

Sprinkler system installer, Seattle

He beat to death a Seattle prostitute, and then dumped her body near the South Park marina. Also convicted of assaulting two other Seattle prostitutes and acquitted of killing another. 

He is in prison in Washington.

Stanley Bernson

Produce salesman, Spokane

Suspected of killing up to 30 Northwest women, Bernson stabbed a 15-year-old girl to death and buried her in a shallow grave in Richland. Authorities in Oregon also charged him for the 1978 murder of a Umatilla teenager, whose body was found in 1985.
He is In prison in Washington.

Randy Woodfield - The I-5 Killer:

Bartender, Eugene/Portland, Ore.

Suspect in at least 13 homicides, including three in Washington. Best known for robbing, raping and killing women in communities along Interstate 5 from Bellevue to Redding, Calif. he often wore a false beard and hooded sweat shirt during his attacks.
He is in prison in Oregon.

Martin Lee Sanders

Long-haul trucker, Spokane

He was convicted of raping and killing two teenagers in Spokane in 1983. He also killed two teenage female hitchhikers in Grant County in 1980. He avoided prosecution in those murders by later pleading guilty to the Spokane homicides. He is in prison in Washington.

Dwayne Elton

Army sergeant, Fort Lewis.

Shot and killed one prostitute, strangled and sliced the throat of another. Elton dumped his victims near Madigan Army Hospital in 1984. The Seattle native later pleaded guilty to the killings in military court to avoid a death sentence.
He is in a military prison in Kansas.

William Scott Smith

Cook, Salem, Ore.

He was convicted of two counts of aggravated murder for the sex slayings of two young Salem women in separate attacks in the spring of 1984. Smith was also questioned in the 1983 unsolved murder of a 14-year-old girl in Idaho. Although not officially a suspect in any Washington murders, Green River investigators at one time looked at him in relation to serial killings in this state. Smith also has family ties to Pierce County. He is in prison in Oregon.

Billy Ray Ballard Jr.

Truck driver, Plains, Mont.

He confessed to killing a Seattle couple who disappeared while sightseeing in the Columbia River Gorge. Their bodies were recovered at different times, dumped 30 miles apart, in rural Grant County. Ballard's arrest for the abduction, rape and torture of two women in Wyoming months later helped investigators match his fingerprint to one left on the Washington couple's abandoned car.
Status: In prison in Wyoming.

Joe Kondro

Laborer, mill worker, Longview

He admits to raping and strangling two young girls in Southwest Washington -- killings more than 11 years apart. Convicted of two other rapes, he also admits to abducting a teenage store clerk at knifepoint. Suspect in dozens of disappearances, rapes and murders since 1982.  He is in prison in Washington.

Westley Allan Dodd

Shipping clerk

Raped, tortured and killed three boys in Vancouver-Portland area. Caught after he tried to abduct a boy from a Camas movie theater. Admitted to molesting about 30 children.
He was executed in Washington in 1993.

Scott William Cox

Long-haul trucker, Newberg, Ore.  

He stabbed one prostitute and strangled another in Portland. Suspected in more than 20 other murders, including the 1988 homicide of Snohomish County transient Hazel Gelnett and the 1990 murder of Tia Hicks, a Seattle woman whose body was found in Montlake Terrace. Also suspected of raping and trying to kill a Seattle prostitute in May 1991. He is in prison in Oregon.

Keith Jesperson - Happy Face Killer

Long-haul trucker, Yakima Valley/Portland

He confessed to eight murders in five states. Jesperson typically raped, beat and strangled truck-stop prostitutes and transients, then dumped bodies along wooded roadsides. Sent taunting letters to media and authorities, signed with a "happy face." Caught after killing his girlfriend near Camas. He is in prison in Oregon.

John Eric Armstrong

U.S. Navy, Bremerton/Detroit, Mich.

Armstrong claims to have killed two women and a transsexual man in Seattle while stationed on the Bremerton-based USS Nimitz from 1993 to 1999, plus eight others worldwide. He was convicted of five Detroit-area prostitute murders. Police discount many of his claims. In prison in Michigan.