By Chris Bartholomew
This was a family of serial killers. They were immigrants from the south who settled in Labette County, Kansas from 1872-1873. They owned a small general store and in inn called the Wayside Inn. There wasn't anything special about John Bender, his wife, son, and pretty daughter Kate. Kate was attractive and claimed to be a healer and psychic, able to contact the dead. She held séances and was a large draw for the Benders' establishment. Kate is believed to be the driving force behind the Bender family killings.
The Bender family home had a large room that was divided by a canvas. If a guest appeared to be wealthy, they would give him a seat of honor, with his back to the curtain. Kate would distract the guest, while John Bender or his son would come from behind the curtain and strike the guest on the top of the head with a hammer. The victim's throat was then cut to ensure death. The body was moved behind the curtain and thrown through a trap door that led down into a cellar. Once in the cellar, the body would be stripped and later buried somewhere on the property, often in the orchard. This system of murder worked well for more than 18 months. Kate drew a number of victims to their door with her offers of spirit communication and her brother often accosted travelers on nearby roads. He would strike up a conversation with them and convince them that spending the night at the inn was preferable to journeying on.
One man came to the inn in search of a brother that had not made it home. The Benders said they had not seen him, but the brother found a locket of his sibling on the floor in the inn under a bed. Sneaking out of the house the man went to the sheriff, who came back with him finding the Benders had fled in the meantime. The men searched the building but almost everything was gone. The brother inspected the cellar and noted that the dirt floor was coated with dried blood. The stench of the place was overpowering. The men searched the fields and the orchard around the house. Among the trees, they found 11 mounds of oddly shaped earth. Several of them appeared to be fresh. The posse began to dig and tragically, the body of the brother was found in the first grave that was opened. More graves were found by walking about the edge of the prairie and taking end gate rods from wagons and sticking them in the ground. Here and there, they would strike a soft place and in every instance, these places proved to be graves. More than two dozen bodies were allegedly found but how many went undiscovered remains unknown. The Benders had vanished completely but authorities would go on searching for more than fifty years without success. Officially, the Benders were gone forever.
Gary and Thaddeus Lewingdon spent most of 1978 committing a series of home invasions and brutal murders throughout Columbus, Ohio and surrounding areas. Police were stumped until Gary was caught using one of the victim's credit cards at a local department store. Gary implicated himself and his brother, 42-year-old Thaddeus Lewingdon, in the slayings.
On December 14, 1978, almost a year after the first known murders, Gary and Thaddeus Lewingdon were charged with murder. Thaddeus received three life terms after being found guilty of murdering three people. Gary was found guilty of killing eight of the ten victims and received eight life terms. Thaddeus remained in prison until he died from lung cancer in April, 1989. Gary was later transferred to a state hospital for the criminally insane, but later returned to Southern Ohio Correctional Facility at Lucasville after he attempted to escape from the hospital. He died of heart failure in October, 2004.
Ray and Faye Copeland were both in their 70s when they started killing, and they used the clothing of their victims to make a warm winter quilt to snuggle under.
In October 1989, Missouri police got a tip and police begin searching. They found five decomposing bodies buried in shallow graves around the farm. Each man had been shot in the back of the head at close range. Evidence of the gun used to commit the murders was found inside the house. Faye said she knew nothing about the killings, and Ray tried to say he was insane.
The jury found Faye Copeland guilty of murder and she was sentenced to death by lethal injection. Soon after, Ray was also found guilty and sentenced to death. The Copelands were the oldest couple to be sentenced to death, but neither was executed. Ray died in 1993 on Death Row. Faye's sentence was commuted to life in prison. In 2002 Faye was released from prison because of her declining health and she died in a nursing home on December 2003, at age 83.
In 1984, at age 21, Debra Brown became involved in a master/slave relationship with habitual killer and rapist Alton Coleman and the two went on a massive killing, raping and torture spree across the Midwest.
Alton Coleman endured the taunts of schoolchildren who teased him because he so often wet his pants. They christened the mildly retarded boy "Pissy." Alton was slow to show emotion and generally kept to himself. Clearly alienated from his peers, Coleman had a reputation for his strong sex drive, reportedly he was bisexual and willing to engage in sex any time, any place with anyone.
Coleman was a "disorganized serial killer." He rarely stalked a particular victim, but instead lashed out at whoever was nearby. He used whatever tools he had handy to kill or incapacitate his victims and there did not appear to be any ritual to his violence.
In separate trials in Indiana, both were found guilty of murder, rape and attempted murder and received the death penalty. Coleman also received 100 additional years and Brown received additional 40-years on charges of kidnapping and child-molesting.
Debra Brown's death sentence in Ohio was later commuted to life because of her low IQ scores and non-violent history prior to meeting Coleman and her dependent personality, making her susceptible to Coleman's control. Currently in The Ohio Reformatory for Women, Brown still faces the death penalty in Indiana.
Alton ordered a huge last meal: filet mignon with sautéed mushrooms, fried chicken breasts, corn bread, biscuits and brown gravy, french fries, broccoli with cheese, salad with french dressing, onion rings, collard greens, sweet potato pie with whipped cream, butter pecan ice cream and a cherry Coke. Alton Coleman was executed by lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville at 10 a.m. Friday, April 26, 2002. He was 46 years old.
Lawrence Bittaker was serving time for assault with a deadly weapon in 1978 when he met Roy Norris at the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo. A convicted rapist, Norris recognized a soul-mate in Bittaker, and they soon became inseparable. While still confined, they decided on a plan to kidnap, rape and murder teenage girls "for fun," as soon as they were freed. If all went well, they planned to kill at least one girl of each "teen" age, from 13 to 19, recording the events on tape and film. Paroled on November 15, 1978, Bittaker began making preparations for the crime spree, obtaining a van that he dubbed "Murder Mack."
On February 9, 1980, Norris led deputies to shallow graves in San Dimas Canyon and the San Gabriel Mountains, where skeletal remains of Lamp and Jackie Gilliam were recovered. An ice pick still stuck out from Gilliam's skull, and the remains bore other marks of cruel mistreatment. Bittaker and Norris might be linked to the disappearance of 30 or 40 other victims.
On March 18 Norris pled guilty on five counts of murder, turning state's evidence against his friend. In return for his cooperation, he received a sentence of 45 years to life, with parole possible after thirty years. Bittaker denied everything. At his trial, on February 5, 1981, he testified that Norris first informed him of the murders after their arrest in 1979. A jury didn't believe him, returning a guilty verdict on February 17. On March 24, in accordance with the jury's recommendation, Bittaker was sentenced to die. The judge imposed an alternate sentence of 199 years and four months, to take effect in the event that Bittaker's death sentence is ever commuted to life imprisonment. Bittaker is still on death row at San Quentin Prison, while Norris still sits at Pelican Bay prison in California.
The only family known in the U.S. that produced two serial killers at separate times in unrelated incidents was the Ranes family in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Nineteen-year-old Larry Lee Ranes, prone to impulsive violence, had been hitchhiking across the country over three months. He went to the home of an acquaintance, Arthur Booth, and confessed that he had killed some people. He was going to see a priest and then commit suicide. Near midnight, Booth managed to alert the police.
Larry Ranes was arrested at Booth's home wearing a victim's stolen watch and shoes. He readily admitted to the killing of two men and surrendered his .22 caliber handgun. While Ranes had no criminal record, throughout his adolescence he had been a known troublemaker. He had grown up in Woodward, Michigan in an abusive and unstable home, and was a year younger than his brother, Danny. They were close, but they also competed aggressively, both loving and hating each other. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, and several psychologists testified that he had committed murder during periods of temporary insanity that had occurred thanks to his rage against his father. He had no remorse for what he had done.
Ranes was convicted of murder and given a life sentence. He appealed it, based on the fact that the prosecutor's psychiatrists had started to examine him before he was properly represented by counsel, and he won a new trial in 1971, but when it became clear to him that his insanity plea was not very strong, he pled guilty and received a new life sentence. The concession he received was to be allowed to change his name, and he chose "Monk Steppenwolf," based on a novel by German author Herman Hesse that had impressed him.
Danny Ranes was said to be equally angry from the abuse received at the hands of their father. In their home in Kalamazoo, they were the middle two children of four; the oldest and youngest were girls. Their father was an alcoholic who got mean when he drank and would hit whoever was close by. Each of the kids took a share of the abuse before the man finally walked out, but by that time the damage was done. He had modeled the use of violence to get through life, and the boys took out their frustrations on each other.
Danny Ranes went to prison for assault and was paroled early in 1972 when he was 28. Within a month, he committed another crime. Most of the details came from Brent Koster, 15 at the time, who said that shortly after he'd met Ranes in June, Ranes had described the incident to him in detail, even showing him where it had occurred at the east side of a store. In March, Patricia Howk, 29, left home with her seventeen-month-old son, Cory, to do some shopping. Ranes accosted and stabbed her to death, leaving her son to wander aimlessly until an elderly woman found him the next day and called the police. The boy had blood on him, so they searched for his mother and found Howk's body behind the Independent Elevator Company building. Her husband had reported her missing. Her billfold was missing, so robbery seemed a possible motive.
Koster said that Danny had bragged how well the method had worked and suggested that they do a similar deed together: they could grab a girl, rape her, take her money and valuables, and then kill her. Koster's six-foot-six frame, which had earned him the nickname, "Stretch," may have been influential, since he looked as if he could subdue anyone. Koster agreed to try it, so they put together a kit with knives, trash bags and ropes, and went cruising. (However, in one trial, Koster admitted that Ranes told him about this incident in July after they had committed two murders.) He said that they had once parked in front of a movie theater for four hours looking for an opportunity, and often went looking for female hitchhikers. They passed the time with talk about sex and killing women, although Koster said that Ranes initiated most of it.
Koster had been a runaway when Ranes had befriended him. At the age of fifteen, he was "game for anything." He'd already stolen cars and had committed over a dozen burglaries, so he was out of control and fairly easy for an older man to manipulate. Even so, he couldn't offer a reason when asked why he had participated in rape and murder on two occasions. "There's a reason for everything, but I can't pin one on that."
As he went off to prison, his appeal in the Michigan Supreme Court was still pending. Some people believed that he wouldn't have graduated to murder had he never crossed paths with Danny Ranes, but others saw him as equally culpable.
Danny Ranes received two convictions: murder in the perpetration of rape and second-degree murder, receiving two life sentences without the possibility of parole. In another case Ranes was convicted of first-degree murder, adding a third life sentence. He then faced another trial for double homicide.
These were two cousins, sons of brothers John and William Harpe, who were Scottish immigrants to North Carolina. The boys were named William (Micaiah/Big) and Joshua (Wiley/Little).
The Harps became outlaws in a gang that roved the North Carolina countryside, raping farmer's daughters, pillaging livestock and crops, and burning farmhouses. The Harps liked to gut their victims and fill their stomach cavities with rocks to weight them down so they would sink in a river.
A posse chased and captured Big Harp, leaving his body on a hill, they took his head and displayed it on some crossroads, by attaching it to an oak tree. Before dying, he confessed to twenty murders, but estimates are around forty. About four years later, Little Harp was recognized, hanged, cut down, and decapitated, his own head impaled along the side of the Natchez Trace outside Old Greenville in Mississippi Territory, as a warning to outlaws.
Delfina and María de Jesús González (known as "Las Poquianchis") were two sisters from the Mexican city of Guanajuato, located some 200 miles north of Mexico City. The sisters ran Rancho El Ángel, called the 'bordello from hell'. The police picked up a woman named Josefina Gutiérrez, a procuress, on suspicion of kidnapping young girls in the Guanajuato area, and she gave up the sisters. Police officers found the bodies of eleven males, eighty women and several fetuses, a total of over 91.
Investigations revealed the scheme was that they would recruit prostitutes through help-wanted ads. Then, when the prostitutes became too ill, damaged by repeated rape, lost their looks, or stopped pleasing the customers, they killed them. They would also kill customers who showed up with large amounts of cash. Tried in 1964, the González sisters were each sentenced to forty years in prison.
In a one man crusade to cleanse modern Russia from the permissiveness of democracy, Sasha Spesivtsev, 27, killed at least 19 street children who he saw as the detritus of society. Inexplicably, with the help of his mother, he also cooked and ate them.
Sasha, an unemployed black marketeer and former mental patient, would lure his homeless victims from the streets and local train stations in the Siberian town of Novokuznetsk to his home. Suspicions of a serial killer active in the area surfaced the summer of 1996 when body parts appeared in river Aba near the school where Sasha's mom, Lyudmila, worked. However, the investigation moved at a snail's pace due to the nature of the victims, the poor children of the forgotten underclass, and the inept Russian judicial bureaucracy.
During the initial stages of the investigation one of Sasha's neighbors repeatedly complained to police of the deathly stench and deafening music coming from his apartment. No one ever came to investigate even though in 1991 a teenage girl was found dead in his place. A year later, when police finally entered his home they found 15-year-old Olga Galtseva dying on the couch with multiple stab wounds to her stomach. In the bathroom they found a headless corpse and in the living room there was a rib cage. Before dying Olga told police that she, together with two other 13-year-old friends, helped the cannibal mother with some bags to her apartment. Once inside they were trapped by Sasha and a fierce dog. Authorities assume that Olga's two little friends are dead. However, they claim they lack the funds to dig for their bodies or perform any genetic testing to establish the identities of the body parts they have recovered.
Alexei Bugayets, a prosecutor for the Kemerovo region, which includes Novokuznetsk, said investigators believe they now can prove Spesivtsev killed 19 people, and expect to add dozens of other cases. Bugayets said a search of Spesivtsev's apartment revealed 80 bloodstained pieces of clothing. He said tests established that none of them contained blood from anyone in Spesivtsev's family.
Sasha, described by authorities as an "intellectual" who has written some books on philosophy, previously had been released from a psychiatric hospital. He was committed after being convicted of murdering his girlfriend. In prison he spends all his time undergoing psychiatric testing and writing poems about the evils of democracy. Asked how he justifies his crimes, he rhetorically answered, "How many people have our democracy destroyed? If people thought about that, there wouldn't be any of this filth. But what can you do?" His mother, on the other hand, has withdrawn into herself and has not uttered a word since her arrest. Sasha, burdened with the heart of a true black marketeer, wants to sell his head to some institute so they can study his brain, and get paid, "in advance, in cigarettes."
Known as the "Old Ladies Killer" and the "Monster of Montmarte" these two men terrorized elderly Parisian ladies in the district of Montmarte from 1984 to 1987. Paulin, a native of Guyana, was a black transvestite drug addict with dyed platinum blonde hair. His boyfriend, Mathurin, a waiter from the Caribbean island of Martinique, was eventually charged as an accomplice in nine of the 21 sadistic slayings committed by the transvestite killer.
The first victim was Anna Barbier-Ponthus, 83. She was found bound, gagged and beaten to death on October 5, 1984. On October 9, 1984, firefighters discovered the body of Suzanne Foucault, 89, bound and with a plastic bag wrapped over her head. On November 5, Iona Seigaresco, 71, was found bound with electrical chord and beaten to death in her flat on Boulevard de Clichy. Confirming police suspicion that a serial killer was praying on older women in the Montmarte district, on November 7 Alice Benaïm, 84, was found dead in her apartment. The next day, Marie Choy, 80, was found dead next door. She was bound with steel wire and was forced to drink caustic soda before being beaten to death. The day after Maria Mico-Diaz, 75, was found bound, gagged and was nearly hacked in two with 60 stab wounds.
All victims were old women ranging from 60 to 95, living alone in Montmarte. In all cases, they were attacked at the moment they opened their door on their way back from the market. Inside their apartments, the women were tortured, bound with electrical chord, gagged and beaten, strangled, stabbed or smothered to death. The apartment was then ransacked in search of money and other valuables.
The frantic Parisian police, overwhelmed by public outcries and a terrified citizenry, went into overdrive and arrested 60 junkies and assorted perverts hoping to crack the case. At the time Paulin and Mathurin left Paris and went to Toulosse where they hung out in gay clubs, did tons of coke and ended up separating after a fight. Back in Paris Paulin severely beat his drug dealer who tried to cheat him. The man called the cops and got Paulin arrested and sentenced to 16 months in jail. Even though authorities had latent prints of Paulin from several crime scenes, they were not able link him to the string of deaths terrifying Montmarte.
In 1987 he was freed for good behavior and was back on the streets drug dealing. In a pre Dennis Rodman fashion statement, he started wearing earrings and dyed his hair platinum blonde. Never one to slack, by November he started killing old ladies again at his usual pace. The weekend of his 24th birthday he killed three old ladies. Another grandmother he left for dead was able to give the cops a description of her assailant. Obviously, a black man with platinum blonde hair and earrings was not hard to find. On December 1 a cop recognized him on the street and arrested him. Once in custody Paulin panicked and fingered his old pal Jean-Thierry Mathurin as an accomplice.
While in jail at Fleury-Mérogis, Paulin collected every newspaper clipping about himself and proudly showed them off to other inmates. Paulin knew he had AIDS since 1985. On March 10, 1989, his health took a turn to the worse. He died of AIDS related complications. His trial was never concluded so he was never found guilty of the crimes he committed. However, there is no doubt in the minds of French authorities that he was the "Monster of Montmartre."
June 4, 1998, Douglas Gretzler, who had been on death row since November of 1976 was executed by lethal injection for two murders in Arizona's first daytime execution. Gretzler, 47, who along with mental hospital escapee Willie Luther Steelman, confessed to killing 17 people during a week long rampage through Arizona and northern California.
Asked if he had any last words, Gretzler turned his head toward the 35 witnesses behind the glass and said: "From the bottom of my soul, I'm so deeply sorry and have been for years for murdering Michael and Patricia Sandberg.... Though I am being executed for that crime, I apologize to all 17 victims and their families."
Gretzler and Steelman were convicted in the November 3, 1973, slayings of Marine Capt. Michael Sandberg and his wife, Patricia, at their Tucson condominium. The lethal duo spotted Sandberg washing his car in a parking lot and forced him into his home, where his 32-year-old wife, a University of Arizona graduate student, was studying. The couple was hog-tied, one on a bed, the other on the living-room couch, for several hours while Gretzler and Steelman ate their food. At sundown, they shot them several times in the head, stole their car, cash and credit cars and headed to northern California.
On November 6, Gretzler and Steelman robbed grocery store owner Walter Parkin of $4,000 in cash and checks and killed all nine people inside Parkin's home outside Victor, California. Among the victims were a 9-year-old boy and 11-year-old girl, both shot in the head as they cowered in bed under the sheets. The killers were arrested two days later in Sacramento where they confessed to six additional killings. Among their possessions was "In Cold Blood," Truman Capote's book about a Kansas murder case.
Martha Seabrook was born in 1920, and had already grown prodigiously fat by the age of thirteen when she was raped by her brother. This unpleasant experience may account for her appetite for the bizarre in sex and her longing for a life of romance. It may also have been at the root of her increasingly callous view of her fellow human beings. Martha trained as a nurse and worked as an undertaker's assistant before being appointed superintendent of a home for crippled children at Pensacola, Florida. Her marriage to Alfred Beck in 1944 quickly ended in divorce, as had two previous marriages.
Raymond Fernandez, six years Martha's senior, was born in Hawaii of Spanish parents, brought up in Connecticut, and had lived for some time in Spain where he had married and fathered four children all of whom he had long since abandoned. He studied black magic and claimed to have an irresistible power over women. Whatever the reason, Raymond Fernandez is thought to have inveigled his way into more than one hundred women's hearts, homes and bank accounts over a couple of years and swindled them all. Each of the victims had been selected from notices in newspaper 'Lonely Hearts Clubs'; which is how, towards the end of 1947, Ray met Martha Beck, and together they added murder to fraud and deceit.
Their problem arose from Martha's fanatical demands on Raymond's fidelity, going to extreme and often burlesque lengths to ensure that he did not consummate any of the other lonely-hearts liaisons into which he entered. On one occasion Martha insisted on sleeping with one of the victims herself to make sure there was no nocturnal fun and games. A born philanderer, Fernandez proved a difficult consort to control and following his frequent falls from grace, became the focus of Martha's violent temper.
In December 1948, Raymond Fernandez made the acquaintance of a sixty-six-year-old widow from New York named Janet Fay. Having plundered her savings via promises of marriage, Raymond invited Mrs. Fay to the Long Island apartment which he shared with his 'sister', and strangled and bludgeoned her to death. The body was later buried.
Mrs Delphine Downing, a young widow with a two-year-old daughter was the next victim, only weeks after the disposal of Mrs Fay. Delphine Downing took Fernandez as her lover, much to Martha's annoyance, and moved into the Downing home in Michigan with her child. After robbing her of what money and possessions they could, Beck and Fernandez forced sleeping pills down Mrs Downing's throat and shot the unconscious woman through the head; to stop the child crying, Beck drowned her in the bath. Despite careful burial of the bodies in the cellar under a new covering of cement, suspicious neighbors reported Delphine and little Rainelle Downing's disappearance to the police.
"I'm no average killer!" Raymond Martinez Fernandez told Michigan cops on the day he was arrested. The slim, smartly dressed, balding man sat in the wooden chair between two detectives as he told a tawdry story of sex, lies and murder. He wiped his sweating forehead every few minutes with a white handkerchief supplied by his co-conspirator, who looked on with wide-eyed admiration and love. For several hours he described their journey through a maze of deception and betrayal that ended with the deaths of as many as 17 women. "I have a way with women, a power over them," he said. That power, he claimed, was achieved by the practice of voodoo.
Fernandez and Beck came to be known as the "lonely hearts killers" in the nation's press. Their murder trial took place during the summer of 1949 in Bronx Criminal Court where the salacious testimony of "abnormal sexual practices" caused a near riot among spectators.
Frederick Walter Stephen West better known as Fred West was an English serial killer. Between 1967 and 1987, he and his wife Rosemary tortured, raped, and murdered at least 12 young women, many at the couple's homes. The majority of the murders occurred between May 1973 and September 1979 at the couple's home in Gloucester. Rose also murdered West's daughter Charmaine while he was serving a prison sentence for theft.
It is believed that incest was an accepted part of the West household, and that his father taught him bestiality from an early age. He was fined for theft in Hereford in April 1961, and again in Newent in October 1961. In the same year West's family kicked him out for sexually abusing a close family relative. Although a history of sexual abuse in Rose's family has been proven, it never was in Fred's. He moved from the family home to live with an aunt a hundred yards away until he moved to Gloucester, where he took a job in a slaughterhouse.
While still married, West met his next wife, Rosemary "Rose" Letts. In 1970, 17-year-old Rose gave birth to their daughter, Heather. Fred West was imprisoned 1970 until 1971.
In 1992, West raped his 13-year-old daughter at Cromwell Street and filmed it, and then raped her twice afterwards. She discussed the incident with her brothers and sisters, who told friends at school. In 1992, the police decided to investigate, eventually leading to Fred West being charged with 12 counts of murder, with Rose as an accomplice. She was also charged with child cruelty, and the remaining children were placed in foster care. Police continued investigating the disappearance of their daughter Heather, six years earlier. After taking statements from social workers, about the joke about "Heather being buried under the patio" and the children themselves, they obtained a further search warrant in 1994, allowing them to excavate the garden in search of Heather. They started searching the house and excavating the garden in February of 1994.
After West's arrest, the police uncovered human bones. He confessed, retracted and then re-confessed to the murder of his daughter, denying that Rose was involved. Rose was not arrested until April 1994, initially on sex offences but later charged with murder. Further bodies were found and, on March 4, 1994, West admitted that he had carried out nine more murders, including those of his first wife and Ann McFall.
Fred and Rose West were brought before a magistrates court in Gloucester on 30 June 1994; he was charged with 11 murders and she with 10. Immediately afterwards, Fred West was re-arrested on suspicion of murdering Ann McFall, whose body was found on 7 June 1994. On the evening of 3 July 1994, he was charged with her murder. On 1 January 1995, Fred West hanged himself in his cell at Winson Green. West was cremated with only three people present.
The evidence against Rose was circumstantial; unlike her husband, she did not confess. She was tried, found guilty of all 10 murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. The trial judge recommended that she should never be released. In October of 1996 the Wests' house, along with the adjoining property, was demolished and the site made into a pathway. Every brick was crushed and every timber was burned to discourage souvenir hunters.
Charles Raymond Starkweather was a spree killer who murdered 11 victims in Nebraska and Wyoming during a road trip with his underage girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate. Charles Starkweather said that the family never went without food or shelter; nor was he ever abused as a child. The Lincoln community considered the Starkweathers to be a strong family with well-behaved children. Guy, the father, was by all accounts a mild-mannered man; a carpenter, he suffered frequent periods of unemployment due to crippling arthritis in his hands and a weak spine. During these periods Charles' mother Helen supplemented the family income by working as a waitress.
Around 1957 eighteen-year-old Starkweather was introduced to fourteen-year-old Caril Ann Fugate. His first killing was a gas station attendant Robert Colvert. Charles went there to buy a stuffed animal on credit for Caril and the attendant refused. After much agonizing over what to do, he fought with the man and ended up shooting him in the head.
On January 21, 1958, Starkweather went to visit Caril at her dilapidated house. Finding her not home, he argued with and shot to death Caril Ann's mother and stepfather. After Caril arrived at home, he fatally clubbed, strangled, and stabbed her two-year-old sister, Betty Jean. He hid the bodies at various places behind the house. The two stayed in the house for six more days, turning people away with a note taped to the door, written by Caril, that read: "Stay a Way Every Body is sick with the Flu." Caril Ann's grandmother became suspicious and called the police. When they arrived on January 27, Charles and Caril had already gone.
It all went downhill from there. Starkweather first claimed Caril had nothing to do with the murders, but changed his story several times, finally testifying at her trial that she was a willing participant. Caril has always maintained he was holding her hostage by threatening to kill her family (she maintained she did not know they were already dead.) Charles Starkweather was executed in the electric chair at the Nebraska State Penitentiary on June 25 1959. He was 19 years old. Caril Ann was sentenced to life in prison but was paroled in 1976.
Bianchi and Buono would usually cruise around Los Angeles in Buono's car and use fake badges to persuade girls that they were undercover cops. They would then order the girls into Buono's unmarked police car and drive them home to torture and murder them. After being abused by both men, the girls would be strangled. Other methods of killing such as lethal injection, electric shock, and carbon monoxide poisoning had been tried by the killers but would ultimately be rejected in favor of strangling.
Even while the girls were being killed, Bianchi applied for a job with the Los Angeles Police Department and had even been taken for several rides with police officers while they were searching for the Hillside Strangler.
One night, shortly after they botched their would-be eleventh murder, Bianchi revealed to Buono he had attended LAPD police ride-alongs, and that he was currently being questioned about the strangler case. After hearing this Buono erupted in a fit of rage. An argument ensued at one point during which Buono threatened to kill Bianchi if he did not flee to Bellingham, Washington. In May 1978 he did flee to Bellingham, joining his girlfriend and son currently living there.
On January 11, 1979, Bianchi lured two female Western Washington University students into a house he was guarding. He forced the first student down the stairs in front of him and then strangled her. He murdered the second young girl in a similar fashion. Without the aid from his partner, he left many clues and police apprehended him the next day. A California driver's license and a routine background check linked him to the addresses of two hillside strangler victims.
28-year-old Ian Brady and 24-year-old Myra Hindley were a murderous combination of personalities, like that of Bianchi and Buono. Brady and Hindley's modus operandi was to pick up young people; sometimes the victim was subjected to rape and mutilation then killed and buried. It was estimated that they killed about 6 young people. They were both convicted of murder on 6 May 1966 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
David and Catherine were an Australian husband and wife pair of serial killers. They murdered four women ranging in age from 16 to 35 in their home in the 1980s, and attempted to murder a fifth. These crimes were referred to in the press as the Moorhouse murders, after the Birnies' address at 3 Moorhouse Street in Willagee on the outskirts of Perth.
David Birnie was found dead in his cell in Casuarina maximum security prison on the 7th October 2005. At the time Birnie, 55, was serving a life sentence for the abduction, rape, torture and murder of four women in 1986. Catherine's first opportunity for parole in 2007 was unsuccessful and her case will be reviewed again in 2010.
During the summer of 1984, the 28-year-old Coleman and Brown, who was 21 at the time, embarked upon a killing spree through several Midwestern states. By the time the couple was caught, Coleman was charged or wanted for questioning in assaults on at least 20 people in 13 separate attacks, including seven murders. Almost all of the victims were African American like Coleman and Brown.
Coleman received four death sentences from three Midwest states: Illinois, Ohio (two times), and in Indiana. At the time of his execution he was the only condemned person in the country to have death sentences in three states. His partner-in-crime, Debra Denise Brown, was originally slated to be executed in Ohio, but in 1991 her death sentence was commuted to life in prison by the Governor. She still has a death sentence for the murder the duo committed in Indiana. However, Brown is serving her sentence, without possibility of parole, in the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, Ohio. On April 25, 2002, while reciting, "The Lord is my shepherd," Coleman was executed by lethal injection.
1980 to 1982, Hollywood, California. Carol Bundy would entice girls to get into her and Douglas Clark's car. Clark would then force oral sex on them and shoot them in the head. The bodies would be decapitated. The heads sometimes were saved for sexual acts. Clark would have sex with some of the victims after they were killed. Both were boyfriend and girlfriend. Carol was a former nurse. They became known as "The Sunset Strip Killers" after being convicted of a series of murders in Los Angeles during the late spring and early summer of 1980. The victims were young prostitutes or runaways.
The case seemed to be solved after Bundy, a divorcee with two children living in the San Fernando Valley, went to police claiming that her lover, Clark, had told her he had killed several young women. All had been shot with a gun Bundy had purchased. Bundy claimed initially that she knew nothing of the murders, "only what (Clark) told me".
Shortly before going to police Bundy, who worked as a nurse, had shot to death, stabbed and beheaded another lover, Jack Murray. Bundy eventually confessed to that murder but claimed it was self-defense. Later, Bundy also admitted that she had been present during one of the murders for which Clark was charged. That murder took place in a car parked behind a gas station in East Hollywood. Bundy claimed Clark shot a prostitute in the head. Bundy had hired the girl for Clark's birthday. Clark insisted Bundy was the shooter. Both agreed that they had disposed of the body together.
Bundy died in prison of heart failure in 2003. Clark was found guilty on six counts of murder and was sentenced to death. Clark is on California's death row. No date has yet been set for his execution.
Together, these two South African gay men are accused of killing four men and a boy in a three year killing spree that began in 1993. While in custody, the relationship between the softly spoken 26-year-old Coetzee and Brown, 32, turned sour with each accusing the other of being responsible for the killings.
The first body was found strangled on August 30, 1993. On November 3, 1993, the badly decomposed bodies of an unidentified 15-year-old boy and a 30-year-old man were found at a farm in Heidelberg. Both victims had been strangled, stabbed and shot. The fourth body was found on September 1, 1995. He had been strangled and his genitals cut off. Three weeks later another body was found. All victims were allegedly last seen alive leaving nightclubs with Coetzee.
Coetzee, a cross-dresser known in gay circles as "Kim," claimed the killings were the work of Brown, and that he merely helped dispose of the bodies. Brown, for his part, claimed Coetzee did the killings and that he merely robbed the victims and helped dispose of their bodies. On May 5, 1997, several days after their trial started in the Johannesburg High Court, Coetzee was found dead in his Boksburg prison cell from an apparent overdose of pills. He left a note saying he no longer wanted to live.
Authorities in Dayton, Ohio, took four children from the custody of Regina Moreland after the death of her 2-year-old grandson, the fourth child to die in her home in the past seven months. Investigators believe Regina might be somewhat responsible for the dying children and plan to review the previous three deaths that, pointedly, were ruled as probable homicides. The first to go was Moreland's granddaughter DaJainae Phillips, 1, who died November 10. Then great-niece Alexis Marshall, 2, died November 13, followed by granddaughter Danatta Moreland, 3, who died on December 24. Two other family members died in March: Moreland's husband, Phillip, committed suicide and his 19-year-old daughter, Jamila, died in a traffic accident.
Eric Elliott, 18, and Lewis Gilbert, 24, of Newcomerstown, Ohio, went on a weeklong crime spree in Ohio in 1994 leaving four dead. In 1996 Gilbert was convicted in the killing of Roxy Ruddell and was sentenced to death. Eric's first trial in May, 1996, ended in a deadlock. In his second trial, moments before jury selection was to begin, Elliott pleaded guilty to participating in the September 1994 slaying of Ruddell because, he said, "he was in fact, guilty."
The victim, 37-year-old Roxy Ruddell was murdered while fishing in a lake. The two boys were arrested with Mrs. Ruddell's truck near Santa Fe, N.M., just days after her body was found. Police believe they also abducted and killed Ruth Loader of Port Washington, who has never been seen again and is presumed dead. Furthermore, they are suspected in the slayings of William and Flossie Brewer, whose bodies were found in their home in Kingdom City. After deliberating five hours, a Callaway County jury decided that Lewis Gilbert should get the death penalty.
Paul enjoyed stories about serial killers, including Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. He assumed the surname "Teale" in homage to the fictional serial killer Martin Thiel, played by Kevin Bacon in Criminal Law.
Paul, unhappy that his wife wasn't a virgin when they married, wanted her to give him her sister Tammy. She agreed and gave her a dose of animal sedative; she started vomiting, and choked to death.
April 16, 1992, in a church parking lot, with map in hand, pretending to be lost, Karla asked 15-year-old Kristen French for directions. From behind Paul approached her with a knife forcing her into the car. They sexually abused and tortured her for days then killed her before Easter dinner with Karla's family. Kristen's body was found in a ditch with her hair cut off on April 30, 1992.
Karla, 35, was released from Ste-Anne-des-Plaines prison on July 4, 2005 after serving a 12-year sentence.
Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole teamed up to make the deadliest serial murder team in history. Due to their seemingly endless confessions and subsequent recanting, combined with alleged "case-clearing" by opportunistic law enforcers, the true totals of the killer duo will never be known for certain. The guesses in victims are from three to three hundred.
Both had childhoods that no one would wish on their worst enemy. Lucas was one of nine children born on August 23, 1936, to a prostitute and her legless husband, both of whom were hopeless alcoholics. His mother physically and mentally abused her mate and their children, most of who were removed from the home or sent away. As for Lucas, he was sent to his first day of school dressed as a girl and reportedly was not allowed to wear shoes. An older brother began engaging in sex with him and introduced him to bestiality in Lucas' early teens. Adding to this horrid Virginia upbringing was his appearance, which was unattractive even before he lost an eye in an accident at the age of seventeen.
Toole was born in Florida and like Lucas was one of nine children, he being the youngest. He suffered several head injuries during his childhood, resulting in a lifelong struggle with seizures, and was sexually molested. Also like Lucas, Toole reported being dressed in girl's clothing on occasion, no doubt a factor in his future transvestitism, and engaged in sex with a sibling (in his case an older sister). Toole was also far below average in the attractiveness department and had a speech impediment that made him nearly impossible to understand at times.
Henry Lee Lucas was arrested on June 15, 1983. He died of natural causes in Huntsville prison, March 11, 2001. His victims were random women, men, young girls, hitchhikers. He was into bestiality, necrophilia, child molestation, and arson.
Ottis was arrested in 1983 and he died of liver failure, Sept. 15, 1996. It is estimated the number of his victims was 2 to 65. He killed random women, men, hitchhikers, and young boys. He was into cannibalism, arson, and cross-dressing.
Despite being born on opposite ends of the globe, American Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, who grew up in China, would eventually meet and team up to be a savagely deadly serial slaying duo.
The two sadists met after Ng escaped military custody after being caught attempting to steal from an armory while a member of the Marines. A mutual acquaintance pointed Ng to Lake, who helped the young Asian hide out from authorities. Eventually Ng was re-captured and served time in Leavenworth Prison. After his release he and Lake reunited and became fast friends. Ng spent most of his time with Lake at a remote property the latter lived on near Wilseyville, California.
By this time Lake had already murdered his own brother, Donald, in 1984. The killing spree did not begin until later in that year. Lake, a survivalist, had built a fortified bunker at the rural residence, though its only use would prove to be as a holding cell for women that he and Ng would torture and kill. Oftentimes the women were kidnapped along with their significant others and their children, who were evidently quickly dispatched to free the killers to practice their disgusting sadism on the female victims until they grew bored and slaughtered them. The two also used credit cards and belongings of their victims to benefit financially from the crimes.
Editor's note: this article was written by Chris Bartholomew for the magazine in 2008 to 2009 and is reproduced as written, apart from the correction of typographic errors. Several of its closing lines were current then and are not now, and in a few places it conflicts with this archive's own record of the convictions. Debra Brown does not still face the death penalty in Indiana: that sentence was vacated in 2019 on evidence of intellectual disability and she is serving life. Lawrence Bittaker is not still on death row; he died at San Quentin on December 13, 2019, after thirty-eight years there. Alexander Spesivtsev has never served a prison sentence for the main series. He was found insane in a second case and held under compulsory treatment from 1999, and on May 21, 2024 the Kemerovo Regional Court found him responsible for fifteen further murders, eleven of them children. His mother Lyudmila was convicted in 1999 of abducting three girls and complicity in their murders and given thirteen years. Thierry Paulin died at the Fresnes prison hospital on April 16, 1989, not on March 10; the article is right that he was never tried. Catherine Birnie was declared a never-to-be-released prisoner, so the 2010 review the article anticipates did not carry the meaning it implies. Delfina Gonzalez died in prison in 1968 and did not complete her forty years. Two points go further than the record. Paul Bernardo was never charged with the murder of Tammy Homolka; his two first degree murder convictions are for Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French, and the roster records the third death as not charged as murder. And Lucas and Toole are not the deadliest team in history on any evidence that survived: Lucas confessed to some six hundred killings, was convicted of eleven, and only about three are credible, while almost all of Toole's confessions collapsed and he was convicted of two. The confession totals the article repeats are the reason those cases are notorious, not a measure of what they did. Regina Moreland was never charged over the deaths in her home, and no finding was made against her. The source document ends mid-sentence in the Lake and Ng section; the archive records that Lake took a cyanide pill four days after his arrest in June 1985 and was never tried, and that Ng was convicted of eleven murders in February 1999 and sentenced to death.