Most lists of serial killer quotes are copied from other lists of serial killer quotes. A line appears on one website, is shortened on the next, is credited to a different killer on a third, and after a few years it is “something Ted Bundy said.” The old version of this page had 156 quotes and not one source.
For this version every quote was checked. We kept only words that a court record, a trial transcript, a police interview, a published letter, a contemporary news report, a broadcast interview or a reputable book attributes to the person named. Where the reliable source gives different wording from the version that circulates online, we use the reliable wording and say so. Each quote comes with an account of who said it, to whom, where and when, what happened next, and a number pointing to the source list at the end.
Of the original 156, 32 survived, most of them only after their wording was corrected against the source. Most of the rest may well be genuine, but we could not find them anywhere except quote sites and lists, so they are gone. A few were plainly false: one famous “Bundy quote” comes from a Hitchcock film. In their place we have added dozens of statements taken from execution records kept by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, from courtroom reporting by the Associated Press and other wire services, from police interviews released by prosecutors and the FBI, from broadcast interviews, and from letters that killers sent to newspapers and police.
The list is limited to serial killers, using the FBI’s definition: the killing of two or more victims by the same offender in separate events. There are two exceptions, Ed Gein and Charles Manson, whom the site covers as famous figures; they are marked. The entries run roughly in the order the words were spoken, from a scaffold in Philadelphia in 1896 to a county jail in Georgia in 2025.
A word on how to read them. These are not wise sayings. Many are self-serving, some are lies, and a few were said for an audience. They are here because they were part of the record, in confessions that convicted people, in letters that taunted police and families, and in statements made at the moment of judgment. Where a killer’s words were contradicted by the evidence, or challenged in court, we say so.
“I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than a poet can help the inspiration to sing.”
Herman Webster Mudgett, who called himself Dr. H. H. Holmes, sold this confession to the newspapers while he waited to hang for the 1894 murder of his business partner, Benjamin Pitezel. The two had planned to fake Pitezel’s death and split a $10,000 insurance payout; instead Holmes killed him and collected the money. The Philadelphia Inquirer, which bought the confession, printed it on its front page in April 1896. In it Holmes owned up to twenty-seven murders. HISTORY gives both sentences quoted here. Much of the rest of the confession is known to be false. [5] [70]
“Gentlemen, I have very few words to say. In fact, I would make no remarks at this time except that by my not speaking I would appear to acquiesce in my execution.”
Holmes said this from the gallows at Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia on the morning of May 7, 1896. He went on to deny killing any of the Pitezel family, Benjamin and three of his children, for whose deaths he was about to die, and claimed that the only lives he had taken were those of two unnamed women who died after abortions he performed. Moments later the trap fell, at about 10:12 a.m., and he was pronounced dead some thirty minutes after. The speech was printed in the Pine Grove Press Herald of Pennsylvania on May 15, 1896. Having just confessed in print to more than two dozen murders, he spent his last words denying them. [69] [70]
“It is my ambition to have killed more people, more helpless people, than any man or woman who ever lived.”
Toppan was a Massachusetts nurse who poisoned patients, friends and members of the families she worked for, mostly with morphine. The deaths that undid her came in 1901 at a summer house in Cataumet on Cape Cod, where she was nursing Alden Davis: within weeks he and two of his daughters were dead. Relatives pressed for an autopsy, morphine turned up, and she was arrested in October 1901. She made this statement in custody or to examiners afterward, according to People, which credits Boston Magazine. She confessed to thirty-one poisonings. The New England Historical Society gives a slightly different wording. [6]
“I have thought it all over, and I cannot detect the slightest bit of sorrow over what I have done.”
Toppan’s answer when asked whether she felt any guilt, as People gives it from the West End Museum’s account of the coverage at the time. At her 1902 trial in Barnstable the question was her sanity. The alienists, as the era’s psychiatrists were called, testified she was insane; Toppan insisted she was sane and knew right from wrong. The jury found her not guilty by reason of insanity, and she spent the rest of her life at the Taunton Insane Hospital, where she died in 1938, aged eighty-one. [6]
“In my lifetime I have murdered 21 human beings, I have committed thousands of burglaries, robberies, larcenies, arsons... For all these things I am not in the least bit sorry. I have no conscience so that does not worry me. I don’t believe in man, God, nor devil. I hate the whole damned human race including myself.”
The opening of the autobiography Panzram wrote in prison between 1928 and 1930, known as the Panzram Papers. He wrote it for Henry Lesser, a jail guard who had treated him decently, and Lesser spent some forty years trying to get it published. The passage is cut here where it lists sexual assaults. The version usually quoted online adds “I preyed upon the weak, the harmless and the unsuspecting... Might makes right,” which we could not confirm. [3]
“Yes. Hurry it up, you Hoosier [expletive]; I could kill a dozen men while you’re screwing around!”
Reported as his last words, to the executioner on the gallows at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, on September 5, 1930. Panzram had been sentenced to death for bludgeoning a member of the prison staff to death at Leavenworth in 1929. Accounts of the exact wording vary, and the source prints the insult with asterisks. [3] [4]
“In the case of Ohliger I also sucked blood from the wound on her temple, and from Scheer from the stab in the neck. From the girl Schulte I only licked the blood from her hands.”
Kürten, the “Vampire of Düsseldorf,” said this to the forensic pathologist Karl Berg in one of their last interviews before his trial in April 1931. The names are those of people he attacked. The passage goes on to describe killing a swan in the Hofgarten in the spring of 1930 and drinking its blood. Kürten was convicted of nine murders and executed in 1931. Berg published the interviews in his book The Sadist. The widely quoted line about hearing his own blood after his execution appears in Berg’s book only as reported speech, not as a quotation. [7]
“I have always had the desire to inflict pain on others and to have others inflict pain on me.”
Fish said this to the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who examined him for the defense before his 1935 trial for the murder of Grace Budd, a girl he took from her family’s New York home in June 1928 after persuading her parents to let her go with him to a birthday party that did not exist. Wertham counted eighteen distinct sexual disorders and argued that Fish was insane. The jury convicted him anyway, and he was executed in the electric chair in 1936. Wertham’s files are in the Library of Congress. The longer version that circulates online adds two more sentences that we could not find in any reliable source. [1]
“I saw so many boys whipped, it ruined my mind.”
Describing his childhood in St. John’s Orphanage in Washington, D.C., where his mother placed him after his father died when he was five. The online version ends “it took root in my head.” [2]
“She’s not missing. She’s down at the house now.”
A neighbor, Elmo Ueeck, recalled Gein saying this after Ueeck teased him that if he had spent more time courting the tavern keeper Mary Hogan, who had disappeared from her Plainfield, Wisconsin, tavern in December 1954, “she’d be cooking for you instead of missing.” Ueeck said Gein “rolled his eyes” and that he was “always talking crazy like that.” Nobody took it seriously. Hogan’s remains were found in Gein’s house in November 1957. This is Ueeck’s recollection, recorded in the trial judge’s book. [8]
“No, I never asked her that way. It was just in a joke.”
Gein denying, in his recorded interviews with investigators, that he had asked Bernice Worden for a date. Worden, fifty-eight, ran the hardware store her late husband had founded in Plainfield. Gein explained that he had only asked whether she skated, because a roller rink had opened and he wanted someone “to hold me up.” On November 16, 1957, her son Frank found blood on the store floor and Gein’s name on the last receipt. Gein admitted killing both women but was tried only for Worden’s murder. [9]
Gein told investigators he had not had sex with the bodies he took from graves because “they smelled too bad.” [10]
“This is the Zodiac speaking. Up to the end of Oct. I have killed 7 people.”
The opening of a letter the unidentified gunman mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle in November 1969, one of two letters and a cipher that arrived that week; newspapers across the country carried the text with his spelling. Newspaper reports of the time list the attacks police connected to him: David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, shot on a lovers’ lane near Vallejo on December 20, 1968; a shooting near Vallejo in July 1969 in which Michael Mageau survived and his companion did not; the stabbing of Cecelia Ann Shepard and Bryan Hartnell at Lake Berryessa on September 27, 1969, which Hartnell survived; and the shooting of the San Francisco cab driver Paul Stine on October 11, 1969. Police said they could firmly attribute five murders to him, not seven. With the letter he enclosed another piece of Stine’s shirt. [78]
“I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tires and then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.”
From an earlier Zodiac note, as the newspapers quoted it in November 1969; the same note warned that “school children are nice targets.” School buses in the area were kept under armed guard for weeks. No attack came. By 1970 the writer was claiming thirteen victims, and his letters continued until 1974, when he wrote to the Chronicle about The Exorcist and complained about advertising for the film Badlands. The case is still open. The spelling in the newspaper versions was partly corrected. [78]
“These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them; I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.”
“I have killed no one, and I have ordered no one to be killed.”
Both from the statement Manson gave on the witness stand on November 20, 1970, in the Tate-LaBianca trial in Los Angeles, with the jury out of the room, so the jurors never heard it. He spoke at length about a life spent in reform schools and prisons: “You expect to break me? Impossible! You broke me years ago.” The second line came at the end, when Judge Charles Older asked if he had anything more to say; he added that he had sometimes implied he might be Jesus Christ but had not “decided yet what I am or who I am.” The version that circulates online runs the two passages together in the wrong order and rewords them. [11] [12]
“Most of the people at the ranch that you call the Family were just people that you did not want, people that were alongside the road, that their parents had kicked out, that did not want to go to Juvenile Hall.”
“You eat meat and you kill things that are better than you are, and then you say how bad, and even killers, your children are. You made your children what they are.”
From the same statement. After a trial lasting nearly a year, Manson and three of his followers, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten, were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. All were spared execution when the California Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in 1972. Manson died in 2017. [11] [12]
“Total paranoia is total awareness.”
From a 1970 jailhouse interview with Rolling Stone writers David Felton and David Dalton, published that June. Manson was describing a coyote in the desert, which “moves through the desert delicately, aware of everything”: “He’s always in a state of total paranoia, and total paranoia is total awareness.” He went on to say that a newborn child is in the same state until its parents teach it otherwise. [13]
“You girls know what I mean, something witchy.”
Not Manson’s own testimony but Linda Kasabian’s. She told the jury that as the group drove out of Spahn Ranch on the night of August 8, 1969, with Tex Watson at the wheel, Manson called them to stop, leaned in at her window and told them to leave a sign. Within hours, at Sharon Tate’s house, the group killed Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant, and four other people. The online version, “If you’re going to do something, do it well, and leave something witchy,” adds words that are not in the record. [14]
“I just wondered how it would feel to shoot Grandma.”
Kemper’s explanation after he shot his grandmother at his grandparents’ ranch in California in August 1964, when he was fifteen. When his grandfather came home, Kemper shot him too, then telephoned his mother and the police and waited for them to arrive. He was institutionalized as a teenager and later released. Other sources word the line slightly differently. [21] [22]
“One side of me says, ‘Wow, what an attractive chick. I’d like to talk to her, date her.’ The other side of me says, ‘I wonder how her head would look on a stick?’”
To the reporter Marj von Beroldingen in the Santa Cruz County jail in 1973, after he had confessed to killing six young women he picked up hitchhiking, and then his mother and her best friend over Easter weekend 1973. The interview was published in Front Page Detective in March 1974, under the headline “I Was the Hunter and They Were the Victims.” [22]
“Death by torture.”
Kemper’s answer at his 1973 trial, when the judge asked him what punishment he thought fitting. He had telephoned the Santa Cruz police to confess, and officers at first did not believe him. Convicted of eight murders, he was sentenced to life in prison. [21]
“I’m not a lizard. I’m not from under a rock.”
Said through tears in the HBO documentary Murder: No Apparent Motive (1984), while Kemper was describing the night he killed his mother. His half brother, David Weber, later warned that such displays should not be trusted. [22]
“When this monster enter my brain, I will never know. But, it here to stay ... Maybe you can stop him. I can’t.”
From the letter Rader hid inside a book in the Wichita Public Library in October 1974, months after he strangled four members of the Otero family in their home. Police retrieved it on a tip and kept it quiet, until a reporter for a weekly paper, the Wichita Sun, obtained a copy and published the story, revealing that the killer said he was stalking his next victim. The original spelling is kept. The letter named him: his code name, he wrote, would be BTK, for “bind, torture, kill.” The version usually quoted adds a sentence that does not appear in published excerpts of the letter. [15] [16]
“There was some reservations on that, but if we went to trial, I think it would be just a long drawn to a guilty, just a long process. So it’s just a mathematical problem.”
Rader’s reply in a Wichita courtroom on June 27, 2005, when Sedgwick County District Judge Greg Waller asked whether he was pleading guilty because he was guilty or for some other reason. It was meant to be the first day of his trial. Instead, at the judge’s direction, he went through all ten killings from 1974 to 1991 in a level voice, at one point correcting the judge on a date. [49] [50]
“I had never strangled anyone before, so I really didn’t know how much pressure you had to put on a person or how long it would take.”
From the same plea hearing, describing the 1974 murders of Joseph and Julie Otero and two of their children. He told the court he had tied the family up, claiming he was wanted and only needed a car and food, and had even put a pillow under Joseph Otero’s head because he had a cracked rib. Then, realizing he wore no mask and they could identify him, he “made a decision to go ahead and put ‘em down.” [49] [50]
“Factor X is probably something I’ll never know. I actually think it may be possessed with demons. Uh, I was dropped on my head when I was a kid.”
From a 2005 interview with a neuropsychologist hired by his defense, excerpts of which Dateline NBC aired in August 2005. “Factor X” was Rader’s name for whatever drove him to kill. In the same recordings he said of his victims: “they were basically an object. They were just an object. That’s all they were.” [17]
“A dark side is there, but now I think light is beginning to shine. Hopefully someday God will accept me.”
From Rader’s long statement at his sentencing on August 18, 2005, which mixed Bible verses, thanks to the police, and apologies. He said he had tracked his victims “like a predator” and that he knew their families could never forgive him. Jeff Davis, whose mother, Dolores Davis, Rader had strangled, called it a “pathetic, rambling diatribe.” Judge Waller gave him ten consecutive life sentences. [51]
“I am the ‘Monster’ -- ‘Beelzebub’ -- the chubby behemoth. I love to hunt. Prowling the streets looking for fair game.”
From the letter left at the scene of the April 17, 1977 shooting of Valentina Suriani and Alexander Esau in the Bronx and addressed to NYPD Captain Joseph Borrelli. The wording here is the Associated Press’s. The version on the old page, “I am a monster. I am the Son of Sam. I love to hunt,” compresses the passage. [19]
“Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood.”
The opening of the letter mailed to the Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin in June 1977, in a summer of heat, a blackout and looting, when the .44-caliber gunman was still at large. The letter went on, “Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C. which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks,” and told Breslin, “I read your column daily and find it quite informative.” [18]
“Hi my name is Mr. Williams and I live in this hole. I have several children who I’m turning into killers. Wait til they grow up.”
Written on the wall beside a hole Berkowitz had punched in his Yonkers apartment, found by police after his arrest on August 10, 1977. A parking ticket issued near the last shooting had led detectives to his car, where they found the .44 in a paper lunch bag. When they took him into custody, he reportedly said, “Well, you’ve got me.” [20] [71]
“I would give my life if I could go back into the past to have prevented this from happening.”
From one of Berkowitz’s prison letters to Andy Kahan, a Houston victims’ advocate, in the years after 2000. Kahan had written to twenty serial killers about the sale of their letters and belongings as collectibles; Berkowitz was the only one who joined his campaign, and he helped persuade eBay to ban such sales. He has since said he is a born-again Christian and calls himself the “Son of Hope.” Serving six terms of twenty-five years to life, he first became eligible for parole in 2002 and was turned down for the twelfth time in May 2024. [19] [71] [72]
“Clowns can get away with murder.”
Gacy said this to the Des Plaines police officers who were following him in December 1978, while they investigated the disappearance of fifteen-year-old Robert Piest, according to the Illinois Supreme Court’s 1984 opinion upholding his conviction, which records the testimony. The online version, “A clown can get away with murder,” is close. [30]
“Ron, I’ve been a bad boy. I killed 30 people, give or take a few.”
To a cement contractor, Ronald Rhode, shortly before his arrest on December 21, 1978, according to Rhode’s testimony as recorded by the Illinois Supreme Court. Rhode had worked with Gacy for years. [30]
“Jack drew that diagram of the crawl space.”
After his arrest Gacy drew police a diagram of the crawl space under his house, then put his hands over his face and said, “What’s going on,” and this. “Jack” was the name he gave to another personality, part of an insanity defense the jury rejected. He also told Detective Michael Albrecht, “Mike, I won’t be in jail very long for this, I won’t spend a day in jail for this.” He was convicted in 1980 of thirty-three murders and sentenced to death on twelve of the counts. [30]
“If you want to charge me with anything, charge me with complicity in two of the murders.”
From a 1992 interview with the Chicago television anchor Walter Jacobson, aired in five parts on CBS 2 that May. Gacy denied the killings he had confessed to in 1978 and claimed a truth serum test showed “I have no knowledge of the crime whatsoever.” He called the picture of himself as a man who picked up altar boys “ludicrous” and added, “Don’t look at me as an innocent babe of the woods.” The prosecutor William Kunkle rejected his story about the orange paint he had sprayed on his garage floor, which in 1978 marked where a body lay. [31]
“I’m the most cold-blooded son of a bitch you’ll ever meet.”
Said to police, according to Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth’s Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer, built on interviews the two journalists recorded with him on death row. [23]
“When you work hard to do something right, you don’t want to forget it.”
Bundy’s answer when asked why he took Polaroid photographs of his victims, as reported by Oxygen from the criminologist Scott Bonn’s book Why We Love Serial Killers. [24]
Michaud has written that Bundy described “possessing” his victims “physically as one would possess a potted plant, a painting or a Porsche. Owning, as it were, this individual.” By Michaud’s account Bundy also said of killing, “A person in that situation is God!” Both come through Michaud’s writing, not from a recording. On the tapes Bundy spoke of a “malignancy” in his personality, and the filmmaker Joe Berlinger has described a voice Bundy called “the entity.” [25]
“I tell you that I am not blaming pornography. I am not saying that it caused me to go out and do certain things. And I take full responsibility for whatever I have done.”
From the interview Bundy gave the evangelical broadcaster James Dobson at Florida State Prison on the afternoon of January 23, 1989, the day before his execution. Bundy asked for the interview. He described his upbringing as “a fine, solid Christian home” and said that violent pornography had fed his fantasies from about the age of twelve or thirteen. Dobson released the recording after Bundy was dead. Many who knew the case saw it as a last performance; Rolling Stone later called the pornography explanation “a cop out” from “a master manipulator.” [55] [56]
“I deserve, certainly the most extreme punishment society has and I think society deserves to be protected from me and from others like me, that’s for sure.”
Bundy’s reply when Dobson asked whether he deserved the punishment the state was about to carry out. He began, “I don’t want to die, I’m not going to kid you,” and then turned the answer back to pornography and the society that sold it. [55]
“Jim and Fred, I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends.”
Bundy’s last words, spoken into the microphone in the electric chair at Florida State Prison at Starke a little after 7 a.m. on January 24, 1989, when Superintendent Tom Barton asked whether he had anything to say. They were addressed to his lawyer, Jim Coleman, and to Fred Lawrence, a minister who had counseled him. Forty-two witnesses watched through the glass. He was pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m. Outside, crowds had gathered to cheer. [57]
“It’s a long story; it goes back a long time. I’ll tell you everything. I want to get it off my chest. Not here, at the police station.”
Nilsen to Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay in the attic flat at 23 Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill, north London, on the evening of February 9, 1983. A drainage technician had reported human remains in the building’s drains, and Jay had come to question the tenants. When Jay mentioned the smell, Nilsen told him where the rest of the remains were. In the police car he said there had been about “15 or 16” victims since 1978. That morning, by one report, he had joked to a coworker, “If I’m not in tomorrow, I’ll either be ill, dead or in jail.” He was convicted of six murders and two attempted murders at the Old Bailey in 1983 and died in prison in May 2018. [83] [84]
“Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland.”
Muttered on his way to a jail bus after a Los Angeles jury convicted him on September 20, 1989, of thirteen murders, the “Night Stalker” home invasions of 1984 and 1985. Leaving the courtroom he flashed a two-fingered “devil sign” at photographers and said the word “Evil.” The online version, “death comes with the territory,” changes the wording. [28]
“I am beyond your experience. I am beyond good and evil. I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells in us all.”
From Ramirez’s statement at his sentencing on November 7, 1989, before Superior Court Judge Michael Tynan sentenced him to die in the gas chamber. He also said: “I need not look beyond this room to see all the liars, the haters, the killers, the crooks, the paranoid cowards,” and “You don’t understand me. You are not expected to. You are not capable of it.” The old page gave this as “You maggots make me sick ... Lucifer dwells within us all,” wording we could not find in the wire report. Ramirez died in 2013, still on death row, after more than two decades at San Quentin. [28] [54]
Andrei Chikatilo was convicted of fifty-two murders of women, girls and boys committed over twelve years across southern Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. He was tried in Rostov-on-Don in 1992, held in a metal cage in the courtroom to protect him from victims’ relatives. In court he described himself as a “mad beast.” When the three-judge panel sentenced him to death on October 15, 1992, he beat on the bars of the cage. A woman in the gallery tried to break through the guards, crying, “Give him to us, give this murderer to us.” Those two words are the only direct quotation from him that the wire reports we checked carry. [68]
“I would cook it and look at the pictures and masturbate.”
From Dahmer’s confession to Milwaukee police in July 1991, describing what he did with a victim’s remains. He began talking after Tracy Edwards escaped from his apartment with a handcuff still on one wrist and flagged down a patrol car. [29]
“I never wanted freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself.”
From the statement Dahmer read to Judge Gram in Milwaukee on February 17, 1992, after a jury rejected his insanity defense and found him sane on fifteen counts of murder. He went on: “I knew I was sick or evil or both. Doctors have told me about my sickness and now I have some peace. I know how much harm I have caused. I feel so bad for what I did to those poor families.” The judge imposed fifteen consecutive life terms; Wisconsin had no death penalty. Less than three years later, in November 1994, another inmate, Christopher Scarver, beat Dahmer to death in a prison bathroom. [52] [53]
“I was once asked by somebody, I don’t remember who, if there was any way sex offenders could be stopped. I said, ‘No.’ I was wrong.”
The start of Dodd’s last words on the gallows at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, just after midnight on January 5, 1993. Dodd had murdered three boys in Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, in 1989: the brothers Cole and William Neer, eleven and ten, and Lee Iseli. He had refused to appeal and asked to hang. A faulty microphone made his words hard to hear, and the twelve media witnesses pieced them together afterward. [44]
“There is hope; there is peace. I found both in the Lord Jesus Christ. I urge everyone: Look to the Lord and you will find peace.”
The rest of Dodd’s final statement. It was Washington’s first execution since 1963 and the first hanging in the United States since 1965. Clair Neer, the father of Cole and William, was seen to hiss and shake his head at the religious words; Lee Iseli’s mother, Jewell Cornell, appeared relieved. Dodd offered no apology. [44]
“There are some things you just can’t run from, this being one of those.”
Rolling to the judge in February 1994, when he stunned the courtroom by pleading guilty at the opening of his trial for the murders of five students in Gainesville, Florida, in August 1990: Sonja Larson and Christina Powell, Christa Hoyt, and Tracy Paules and Manny Taboada, killed in three separate attacks over three days at the start of the University of Florida’s fall semester. Rolling, a drifter from Shreveport, Louisiana, had been camping in the woods near campus. He was identified by belongings at his campsite and by DNA after an arrest for a grocery store robbery. [75]
“I do deserve to die, but do I want to die? No. I want to live. Life is difficult to give up.”
Rolling to the Associated Press while on death row. He blamed his crimes on abuse in childhood and on prison, and claimed multiple personalities. He was executed by injection at Florida State Prison on October 25, 2006, sixteen years after the killings. [75]
“I am a serial killer. I would kill again.”
From the witness stand in Florida on July 20, 2001, at a hearing before Circuit Judge Michael Hutcheson. Wuornos had written to the Florida Supreme Court asking to fire her lawyers and end her appeals, and the court ordered the hearing to test whether she was competent. She told the judge her 1992 testimony, that she had killed in self-defense against men who attacked her, was a lie, and that she had killed the men in the first degree and robbed them. “I have hate crawling through my system,” she said, and “There’s no sense in keeping me alive.” She was under six death sentences for the killings of middle-aged men in central Florida in 1989 and 1990. [34]
“I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the Rock and I’ll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mothership and all. I’ll be back.”
Wuornos’s last words, from the gurney in the execution chamber at Florida State Prison near Starke on the morning of October 9, 2002. Witnesses said her eyes searched the audience briefly before she looked at the ceiling and spoke. “The Rock” was a biblical reference to Jesus. She was pronounced dead at 9:47 a.m., the tenth woman executed in the United States since 1976. Questions about her sanity were never settled. [59]
None of the four Wuornos quotes on the old page could be traced. The best-known of them, a curse at the jurors who convicted her, does not match the outburst recorded after her January 1992 verdict, which Oxygen gives as “I was raped. I hope you get raped, Scumbags of America.” [35]
“By discrediting me personally, they hope to discredit my political ideas.”
Kaczynski, the Unabomber, said this in a federal courtroom in Sacramento on May 4, 1998, the day he was sentenced. His sixteen bombs, mailed or planted between 1978 and 1995, killed three men in separate attacks, among them the advertising executive Thomas Mosser and the timber lobbyist Gilbert Murray, and injured twenty-nine other people. He complained that the government’s sentencing memo, which quoted his journal (“My motive for doing what I am going to do is simply personal revenge”), contained “false statements, misleading statements,” and asked people “to reserve their judgment about me and the Unabom case.” Mosser’s widow, Susan, urged the judge to lock him away so deep “that when he dies he will be closer to hell.” Judge Garland Burrell Jr. imposed four consecutive life sentences under a plea agreement, calling the crimes “vicious acts of terrorism.” [85] [86]
“I’m ready to be released. Release me.”
McDuff’s whole last statement, as the Texas Department of Criminal Justice recorded it, before his execution by injection in Huntsville on November 17, 1998. In 1966 he had murdered three teenagers near Rosebud, Texas, and was sentenced to death, but the Supreme Court’s 1972 ruling against capital punishment spared him. He was paroled in 1989 and went on to kill at least two more women, Colleen Reed and Melissa Ann Northrup, in late 1991 and early 1992, and was sentenced to death again in 1993 for Northrup’s murder. Authorities suspected him of as many as fourteen more. [40] [41]
“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.”
At a 1999 court hearing in Colombia, after his arrest that April on an attempted rape charge. When an investigating judge asked whether he had killed the 114 children whose bodies had been found in fifty-nine towns since 1994, Garavito admitted it, begged forgiveness, and went on to confess to more, eventually more than 190. His victims were boys between eight and sixteen, mostly from poor families, whom he lured by posing as a monk, a street vendor or a homeless man. He was convicted of 143 killings and died in prison in October 2023. [33]
“Uh, do I look like the Green River killer?”
In his 2003 confession interviews, Ridgway told investigators that women he picked up sometimes asked whether he was the Green River Killer, and that he deflected the question this way because “they always thought it was a big tall guy.” He told them he preferred to kill at his house, after showing the women his son’s room to reassure them. [26]
“I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight.”
From the written statement a prosecutor read aloud in King County Superior Court in Seattle on November 5, 2003, as Ridgway pleaded guilty to forty-eight murders, saying “guilty” forty-eight times. The statement also said: “I wanted to kill as many women as I thought were prostitutes as I possibly could,” and “Choking is what I did, and I was pretty good at it.” The plea spared him the death penalty in exchange for leading investigators to remains. [27] [47]
“I’m sorry for killing all those young ladies. I’m sorry for the scare I put into the community.”
Ridgway’s first public statement, at his sentencing on December 18, 2003, after about twenty families had spoken. Of the victims who were never found he said, “May they rest in peace. They deserve a better place than where I gave them.” Robert Rule, whose sixteen-year-old daughter Linda was killed in 1982, told him, “I forgive you for what you’ve done.” Judge Richard Jones ordered forty-eight seconds of silence, one for each victim, then sentenced him to life without parole and told him he had “Teflon-coated emotion.” [46] [48]
“I was going to do one more, make it an even 50.”
Pickton to an undercover Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer planted in his cell after his arrest in February 2002, on a recording played to the jury at his trial in British Columbia in early 2007. He said he had been caught because he got sloppy. In his first police interview he had told officers, “You make me more of a mass murderer than I am,” and “I should be on death row.” His lawyer, Peter Ritchie, argued that he was bragging to a man he thought was a fellow criminal. The remains or DNA of thirty-three women were found on his pig farm in Port Coquitlam. He was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder in 2007 and died in May 2024 after another inmate assaulted him. [63] [64] [65]
“I want to ask if it is in your heart to forgive me. You don’t have to. I know I allowed the devil to rule my life.”
From Resendiz’s last statement before his execution in Huntsville, Texas, on June 27, 2006. He went on: “I don’t deserve to cause you pain. You did not deserve this. I deserve what I am getting.” He was executed for a murder in Houston in December 1998, when he got into a woman’s home through an open door, beat her to death with a statuette, took her cash and drove off in her Jeep. The TDCJ record notes that he “is believed to have committed a series of murders throughout Texas and other states.” Born in Durango, Mexico, he had served prison terms in Florida, New Mexico and federal custody. [36] [37]
“The Samsoe case is based on poor premises, all of which must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Alcala, acting as his own lawyer, said this in his closing argument in an Orange County courtroom in 2010, at the end of his third trial for the murder of twelve-year-old Robin Samsoe, who vanished on her way to ballet class in 1979. During the trial he had questioned himself on the witness stand, showed the jury a clip of his 1978 appearance on The Dating Game, and played Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant.” Prosecutors pointed to the earrings found in his Seattle storage unit, one pair with DNA from another victim, Charlotte Lamb. The jury convicted him of murdering four women and the girl, and he was sentenced to death. He later pleaded guilty in New York to the 1970s murders of Cornelia Crilley and Ellen Hover, telling the judge he wanted to get back to California to pursue his appeal, and in January 2013 received another twenty-five years to life. [81] [82]
“Sitting in prison for the rest of my life is a death penalty. I’d rather go out while I still have some sanity and good memories.”
Keyes to federal prosecutors and investigators in Anchorage in 2012, in interviews the government released in April 2013. He had kidnapped and killed Samantha Koenig, an eighteen-year-old coffee stand worker, in Anchorage in February 2012, and confessed to killing Bill and Lorraine Currier in Vermont in June 2011. His price for talking was a quick execution date. He also said he was “more sane than most Americans” and that “It was all like a mind game with me.” He killed himself in the Anchorage jail on December 2, 2012, before trial. [77]
“The things I’ve done ... I don’t feel bad about them. I did them for myself ... They’re mine.”
From the interviews unsealed in 2018 after the author Maureen Callahan sued for their release. Investigators believe he may have killed eleven people. Most of those victims have never been identified. The FBI has posted video of his interviews on its website. [76]
“I thought that people weren’t suffering anymore. So, in a sense, I thought I was helping.”
Cullen to Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes, in an interview recorded at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton in March 2013 and broadcast that April, the first time the program had interviewed a serial killer in its forty-five years. Cullen, a critical care nurse, killed patients with drug overdoses, most often the heart drug digoxin, over sixteen years at hospitals and nursing homes in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He admitted to about forty deaths and was serving multiple life sentences. When Kroft pointed out that some of the patients were not close to death or in great pain, Cullen said: “There is no justification ... the only thing I can say is that I felt overwhelmed at the time.” [66] [67]
“I tried to kill myself throughout my life because I never really liked being who I was. I didn’t feel I was worthy of anything.”
From Cullen’s taped confession to detectives, portions of which 60 Minutes aired for the first time. Asked by Kroft whether he was sorry, Cullen said yes, but added: “like I said, I don’t know if I would have stopped.” Pressed for something to tell the families, he said, “It felt like I needed to do something and I did. And that’s not an answer to anything.” [67]
“No amount of words could ever undo what I’ve done. To the family of my victims, I wish I could undo that past.”
From Shore’s last statement before his execution in Huntsville, Texas, on January 18, 2018. Shore, who had worked as a wrecker driver and lineman, strangled a fifteen-year-old girl in Harris County in 1986, according to the TDCJ’s summary of his case, and between 1992 and 1995 killed a twenty-one-year-old woman and three girls aged nine, fourteen and sixteen. He was executed for the 1992 murder. He ended: “I will die with a clear conscience. I made my peace. There is no others.” [38] [39]
“I think I’m the only one in the world. And that’s not an honor, that is a curse.”
To 60 Minutes, after he had confessed to ninety-three killings between 1970 and 2005. Little said he had been raised in Lorain, Ohio, by his grandmother, and that he never hurt anyone he loved. Just before this line he said: “I don’t think there was another person who did what I liked to do.” He began confessing in 2018 to a Texas Ranger, James Holland, and made drawings of many of his victims. Investigators had confirmed nearly sixty of the killings by the time he died at a California hospital in December 2020, aged eighty. [32]
“To each and every one of you I sincerely apologize for all that I have done.”
Högel, a former nurse, to the regional court in Oldenburg, Germany, on June 5, 2019, in his final statement at a trial for one hundred murders of patients at two hospitals in Oldenburg and Delmenhorst between 2000 and 2005. He had told his first trial that he deliberately sent patients into cardiac crisis because he enjoyed the feeling of resuscitating them. During the seven-month trial he admitted forty-three of the killings and said he could not remember fifty-two. The next day Judge Sebastian Buehrmann convicted him of eighty-five murders, acquitted him of fifteen for lack of evidence, and sentenced him to life, noting the “particular seriousness” of the crimes. [79] [80]
“I’ve listened to all your statements. Each one of them. And I’m truly sorry to everyone I have hurt.”
DeAngelo, the former police officer known as the Golden State Killer, at his sentencing in Sacramento on August 21, 2020, after three days of statements from rape survivors and the families of the thirteen people he murdered across California between 1975 and 1986. He had sat in a wheelchair with a face mask throughout; he stood and removed the mask to speak. Judge Michael Bowman sentenced him to consecutive life terms without parole under a plea deal that spared him the death penalty. DeAngelo, a former police officer who had served from 1973 to 1979 and was then seventy-four, had been arrested in 2018 and pleaded guilty in June 2020 to thirteen counts of first-degree murder, admitting many uncharged rapes and other crimes as part of the deal. [60] [88]
“There’s no words I can say that would offer any comfort. I can only say I’m sorry for the pain I caused the families and my family. I don’t ask for forgiveness, because I don’t think I can forgive anyone for doing what I did.”
Mays, a former nursing assistant, wept as she said this in federal court in Clarksburg, West Virginia, on May 11, 2021. In 2017 and 2018 she had injected seven elderly veterans, aged eighty-one to ninety-six, with fatal doses of insulin at the Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center, where she was not authorized to give medication. Judge Thomas Kleeh noted that she had searched the internet for female serial killers and told her, “you knew what you were doing.” She received seven consecutive life sentences plus twenty years. She offered no explanation. [73]
“All I had in mind was a distraction and the distraction was, you know, deviant fantasies. And the deviant fantasies distracted me from my everyday life. But then it led me to my crimes.”
Forrest to the Washington parole board at a hearing on May 18, 2022. He had been in prison since 1974 for the abduction and murder of Krista Blake, and was then awaiting trial for the 1974 killing of Martha Morrison, a Portland teenager, after DNA found her blood on a dart gun he had used in an attack on another woman. He told the board, “I’m sorry for all the pain that I’ve created,” but when asked about other women he is suspected of killing, said his attorney had told him not to comment on “unadjudicated” crimes. A Clark County jury convicted him of the murder of Morrison, who was seventeen, in February 2023, and he was sentenced to life. [45] [87]
“I am evil. I did this.”
Letby, a neonatal nurse at the Countess of Chester Hospital in England, wrote these words in capital letters on a note that police found in her home during a search. Prosecutors read it to the jury at Manchester Crown Court in October 2022. The same note said “I killed them on purpose because I’m not good enough” and “I am a horrible evil person,” but other notes found with it said “I haven’t done anything wrong.” Her lawyer, Ben Myers, told the jury the notes were “the anguished outpouring of a young woman in fear and despair,” not a confession. She was convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others between June 2015 and June 2016, and is serving fifteen whole-life terms. She maintains that she is innocent, and in February 2025 her lawyers applied to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, the body that can send cases back to the appeal courts. [61] [62]
“I don’t think I’m a serial killer. I just think in situations; I just do what I got to do. That’s it.”
Cherry to Mark Winne of WSB-TV in Atlanta, in an interview inside the Clayton County jail broadcast on August 11, 2025, days after he pleaded guilty to murders in Clayton County. He had already been sentenced to life in Fulton County for another killing, and was expected to be sent to Jacksonville, Florida, where he is suspected of two more. He went on: “I’m put in situations and I’m just the one who shoots first.” Asked whether he expected Florida to seek the death penalty, he said, “Probably.” Deputy Chief Assistant District Attorney Jacqueline Broadnax said she had never seen anyone “as cold, as heartless.” [74]
Some of the most-shared lines on the old page fail outright, and several of the most famous “last words” are less certain than they look.
“We all go a little mad sometimes” is not Ted Bundy. It is Norman Bates, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).
“I like children, they are tasty,” credited to Albert Fish, appears nowhere except on quote sites and in memes.
John Wayne Gacy’s last words are often given as “Kiss my ass.” A&E’s account of his execution at Stateville on May 10, 1994, calls that speculation, notes that other reports at the time had him blaming the state of Illinois for killing him, and quotes the prosecutor William Kunkle, who sat in the front row, as saying no words were spoken at all. CBS Chicago also notes that the accounts vary. We have not given him last words. [31] [58]
Richard Ramirez’s sentencing speech is usually quoted as beginning “You maggots make me sick.” The Associated Press report of the hearing has no such phrase. We use the AP wording above.
The Zodiac line on the old page, “If the blue meanies are going to get me they’d better get off their asses and do something,” could not be matched to any letter. The words “blue meannie,” spelled that way, do appear in a letter of April 1970, where the writer said he hoped police did not think he had “wiped out that blue meannie with a bomb at the cop station.” The line as quoted online is not in that letter or in the November 1969 letter to the Chronicle. [78]
Tommy Lynn Sells, executed in Texas on April 3, 2014, for the murder of thirteen-year-old Kaylene Harris in Del Rio on the last night of 1999, appears on many lists with long, rambling “confessions.” The prison record says only that he “declined to make a last statement.” The interview passages credited to him we could not trace, and they have been removed. [42] [43]
H. H. Holmes’s 1896 confession, quoted near the top of this page, is a true record of what he sold to the newspapers, but not a true record of what he did. Much of it is known to be false, and on the scaffold he denied it.
Several quotes were duplicates, the same line given twice under one name with different punctuation. Others were credited to people who were not serial killers at all: a man who killed one actress, a man convicted of one murder in Darlington, a spree killer, an accomplice, and a nineteenth-century French grave robber who killed no one. They have been removed.
Long passages credited to Gacy, apparently from a 1992 death-row interview, may well be genuine, but no news outlet or published transcript we could find reproduces them. Several dozen lines credited to Kemper, Bundy, Ramirez, Dennis Nilsen, John Haigh and John Christie probably come from books, ghost-written newspaper confessions or interview tapes. If a reliable copy of those words turns up, they can come back with a source.
• May 7, 1896: H. H. Holmes speaks from the gallows in Philadelphia. • 1901 to 1902: Jane Toppan, in custody and before her Barnstable trial, speaks of her “ambition.” • 1928 to 1930: Carl Panzram writes his autobiography in prison; September 5, 1930, his last words at Leavenworth. • 1931: Peter Kürten’s interviews with Karl Berg in Düsseldorf. • 1934 to 1935: Albert Fish talks to Fredric Wertham before his trial. • 1954 to 1957: Ed Gein’s “She’s not missing” remark and, after his arrest in November 1957, his recorded interviews. • 1964 and 1973: Edmund Kemper explains the shooting of his grandmother; nine years later he gives his jail interview and asks for “death by torture.” • October and November 1969: the Zodiac letters to the San Francisco Chronicle. • June 1970: Manson’s Rolling Stone interview; November 20, 1970, his statement in court. • October 1974: BTK’s letter in the Wichita Public Library. • April to August 1977: the Son of Sam letters; August 10, Berkowitz’s arrest. • December 1978: Gacy’s remarks to the officers following him and to Ronald Rhode. • February 9, 1983: Nilsen to DCI Peter Jay in Muswell Hill. • January 23 and 24, 1989: Bundy’s interview with James Dobson and his last words. • September 20 and November 7, 1989: Ramirez after his verdict and at his sentencing. • July 1991 and February 17, 1992: Dahmer’s confession and his statement in court. • October 15, 1992: Chikatilo sentenced in Rostov-on-Don. • January 5, 1993: Westley Allan Dodd’s last words. • February 1994: Danny Rolling pleads guilty. • May 4, 1998: Ted Kaczynski in court in Sacramento; November 17, 1998: Kenneth McDuff’s last words. • 1999: Luis Garavito’s confession in Colombia. • July 20, 2001, and October 9, 2002: Wuornos in court and at her execution. • 2002 to 2007: Pickton’s cell recording and trial. • November 5 and December 18, 2003: Ridgway’s plea and sentencing. • June 27 and August 18, 2005: Rader’s plea and sentencing. • June 27, 2006: Angel Maturino Resendiz’s last words. • 2010: Rodney Alcala’s closing argument. • 2012: Israel Keyes’s interviews in Anchorage. • April 2013: Charles Cullen on 60 Minutes. • January 18, 2018: Anthony Shore’s last words. • 2018 to 2020: Samuel Little’s confessions. • June 5, 2019: Niels Högel’s apology in Oldenburg. • August 21, 2020: Joseph DeAngelo’s apology in Sacramento. • May 11, 2021: Reta Mays in court in Clarksburg. • May 18, 2022: Warren Forrest before the parole board; October 2022: Lucy Letby’s notes read to the jury. • August 2025: Edward Cherry’s jailhouse interview.
A quote presented as a killer’s own words carries a weight that a description does not. That is why the false ones spread so fast, and why it matters to get them right. Most of the genuine words on this page were said in courtrooms, police interviews, prison death chambers and letters that were part of how these men and women were caught, convicted or punished. Read together, they show less a hidden wisdom than a pattern: excuses, blame passed to others, bargaining, and apologies that arrive only when nothing is left to lose. Behind every one of them are people whose lives ended so that these words could be said, and families who sat in the same rooms and heard them.