Many serial killers become so enamored by their own crimes that they take souvenirs and trophies from their victims. Sometimes these are as simple as an item of clothing, other times it’s a body part or piece of personal identification. Occasionally it’s something completely bizarre and disgusting ---- even for a torturing, raping, monstrous serial killer.
In terms of trophies, sadism and sheer butchery, Ed Gein wins the prize. The notorious serial killer started his reign of terror as a grave robber and necrophiliac. He then moved on to murder in the late 50s, and by the time he was caught, had racked up an array of trophies that’s still legendary.
Among the horrors found at his house were a wastebasket and chairs made of human skin, bowls made of skulls, a corset made of a female torso, masks made of human faces, numerous sex organs in a box, and a belt made of nipples.
Gein’s crimes would inspire the fictional serial killers from Psycho and Silence of the Lambs, among others. Initially found unfit for trial, after confinement in a mental health facility, in 1968, Gein was found guilty but legally insane, and was confined in psychiatric institutions.
He died at Mendota Mental Health Institute of Cancer – induced liver and respiratory failure, on July 26, 1984.
Australian serial killer Ivan Milat murdered at least seven people and buried them in a forest in New South Wales. When he was finally caught, authorities found a trove of stolen camping supplies, including sleeping bags, clothes, equipment, and tents ---- all taken from the people he brutally murdered.
Police maintain that Milat may have been involved in many more murders than the seven for which he was convicted. He was sentenced to a six year imprisonment for the attack on victim Paul Onions, and seven consecutive life sentences for each of the murders.
Milan was incarcerated in the maximum – security wing of Goulburn Prison, near Sidney.
Murderer Alex Mengel was a suspect in the random murder of a Westchester, New York police officer. While being chased, he lost control of his car and crashed it into a wall. Once taken into custody, the car was found to belong to a woman who had gone missing a few years earlier.
What clinched Alex as the woman’s killer was that the car contained not just two guns, but what police originally deemed to be a wig, but was actually her scalp – which Alex wore as a wig when he kidnapped and murdered another one of his victims.
Eleven days later, the woman’s remains were discovered in heavy woods. She had been stabbed once in the chest, her scalp and the skin of her face sliced away by the killer. Tissue samples from the body made a positive match with the scalp recovered from the car.
On April 26, returning under guard from his arraignment in Greene County, Alex tried to escape from his state police escort on the Taconic State Parkway. Undaunted by handcuffs and chains, he grappled with one guard, seizing the officers side arm, and was killed by the driver before he could squeeze off a shot.
Ted Bundy was creepy, psychotic, and determined as serial killers get. Among the tortures heaped on his nearly three dozen victims, was Bundy’s practice of chopping off their heads and putting them on display in his apartment. He’d also sleep next to their headless corpses until putrification made it unbearable.
Bundy was first arrested in Utah but escaped and continued his killing spree. He was stopped for a traffic violation in Florida leading to his final arrest, February 15, 1978. He was finally sentenced to death and died in the electric chair in 1989.
At the time of his execution, Bundy had confessed to 30 murders, though the actual number of his victims remains unknown. During his final interview before execution, he not only blamed himself for his actions, but also blamed pornography.
English killer John George Haigh wasn’t known as the “Acid Bath Killer” because he was a nice guy, but maybe the meanest thing Haigh did was that after he shot and killed Dr. Archibald Henderson and his wife Rose, he melted their bodies, forged a letter saying he was a representative of their estate, and sold all of their possessions.
The one thing he didn’t sell was their dog, Pat, a Red Irish Setter, which he kept for himself.
Texas serial killer Charles Albright had an especially gruesome trophy he took from his victims ---- their eyeballs. He had taught himself to remove a body’s eyeballs without disturbing their eyelids. An operation that led police to think he might have been a doctor.
But he wasn’t he was just a psychopath. He was arrested in 1991, a year after his first killing, and charged with three murders, but only convicted of one. He is still in prison.
Horrible cannibal killer Jeffrey Dahmer had a side habit of keeping various parts of his victims. It started when he preserved the head and genitals of his fifth victim in acetone, and by the time he was done, had a freezer full of heads, torsos, skin and internal organs. He also had a lobster pot full of genitals.
Dahmer talked searchingly about his motives, attempting to explain the inexplicable : what drove him to pick up young gay men in bars, bring them home, drug them strangle them, have sex with their corpses, and then, in some cases, cannibalize them.
He needed to live in a world in which he could completely control a person --- a person that he found physically attractive, and keep them with him as long as possible, even if it meant just keeping part of them.
The score of Alaska, Robert Hansen spent 10 years abducting and flying women to remote areas of the frozen tundra and hunting them for sport. He killed at least 17 prostitutes, bartenders, and waitresses before being caught.
When he was apprehended, he was found to have a large collection of trophies taken from the women, including numerous pieces of jewelry. He also funded much of his killing spree with insurance money from the fraudulent theft of actual, legitimate hunting trophies.
Hansen, who got the nickname the “Butcher Baker,” owned a bakery in a downtown mini-mall in the 1970s and 1980s. He lived across town with his wife and children, who knew nothing of his other life. Only 12 bodies of the 17 women Hansen confessed to killing have been found.
He was convicted of four of the murders in a deal that spared him having to go to trial 17 times. He was serving a 461 – year sentence in Alaska at the time of his death. He was 75 when he died .
John Christie was an English serial killer with eight murders to his name. He gained the nickname “The Rillington Place Strangler” after both his method of killing and the street where he did it. When Christie moved out of his flat at 10 Rillington Street, he sublet it to several renters, who soon found three corpses in a wall behind his kitchen alcove.
A thorough search was initiated, which revealed not only the three kitchen cupboard corpses, but also his wife Ethel’s body under the parlor floorboards, and two further bodies in the garden. Christie was sentenced to death and hanged at Pentonville Prison in London, on July 15, 1953.
Long Island serial killer Joel Rifkin murdered 17 prostitutes over three years in the early 90s. After being pulled over for driving without a license plate, Rifkin confessed to his murders and led police to his house.
In his bedroom was a massive haul of trophies from his victims, including panties and bras, drivers licenses, jewelry and a library card. Oh, and he had a partially decomposed body in the trunk, which he was on his way to bury.
His victims were mostly petite white and Asian women who had disappeared over three years.
Believed to be the most prolific female serial killer in history, Elizabeth Bathory was a 17th century Hungarian Countess with a taste for horrific murder. Her exact number of victims will never be known, but hundreds of witnesses testified to her crimes, including one who said that she drained the blood of her victims and bathed in it in order to keep her youthful beauty.
The stories of her serial murders and brutality are verified by the testimony of more than 300 witnesses and survivors as well as physical evidence, and the presence of horribly mutilated dead, dying and imprisoned girls found at the time of her arrest.
Bathory was imprisoned in Catchice Castle and placed in solitary confinement. She was kept bricked in a set of rooms, with only a small slit left open for ventilation and the passing of food. She remained there for four years until her death.
When so -called “Yellowstone Killer” Stanley Dean Baker was arrested after a traffic accident , he shocked police by saying “I have a problem. I am a cannibal.” As if to prove it, he turned out his pockets and showed them several small, white objects. They were finger bones hacked off a victim in case Baker got hungry. He also confessed to eating his victims’ heart.
Along with the severed digits, Baker had a copy of the “Satanic Bible “ in his pocket. Baker freely confessed to what happened. He pleaded guilty to murder and was given a life sentence. Baker apparently forgot about the devil and behaved like an angel. He served just 15 years in prison before being paroled and vanishing
Indonesian killer, Ahmad Suradji believed he was a sorcerer, so he murdered 42 women in order to gain their powers. He would bury them up to their necks, then strangle them with a cable and bury their bodies in a complicated ritual.
The worst part of this (other than the murder) is that it included draining and drinking the saliva of the victim. The killing spree began in 1986 when Ahmad said his late father appeared to him in a dream ordering him to kill 70 women.
He was arrested in 1998, when the bodies were discovered in a field with their heads pointing toward Ahmad’s house. He was eventually executed by firing squad.
Necrophiliac murder Jerome Brudos had several nicknames. One was “The Lust Killer” and another was “The Shoe Fetish Slayer.” It’s the second nickname that became his gruesome claim to fame. Jerry had been obsessed with women’s shoes from an early age, and when be started committing crimes he’d often steal the shoes of the women he attacked.
His crimes escalated to murder in the late 60s, and one of his victims had her foot removed so Jerry could put shoes on it. When he was caught he had various female body parts scattered around his garage.
Jerry eventually pled guilty to three murders. For these crimes he received three consecutive life sentences with the possibility of parole. In 2006, while serving his time at the Oregon State Penitentiary, he died of natural causes. At the time, Jerry was the longest incarcerated inmate in the history of the Oregon Department of Corrections.
Ukrainian mass murderer, Anatoly Onopnenko, claimed to have killed 52 people, including multiple young children, in a six year reign of terror that led local media to call him “The Terminator.” He explained to police that he was told to commit these murders by voices he heard in his head.
Anatoly was found to be in possession of a total of 122 items, including a massive stash of weapons, which matched the murder weapons in several of the killings, and underwear that every single one of his victims and had been wearing when he killed them.
Anatoly was found guilty of murder, and according to Ukrainian criminal code, sentenced to death by shooting. Anatoly died in prison of heart failure . . . justice was served by the powers that be.
Known as the “Kindly Killer,” Dennis Nilsen was Britain’s version of Jeffrey Dahmer, and was just as prolific and grisly. He murdered young men he’d lured to his house. He would then strangle and drown his victims during the night.
After they were dead, he performed a ritual where he bathed and dressed their bodies. Nilsen kept the bodies for extended periods, sometimes several months. He told police he would have sex with them and talk to them. He used his butchery skills gained when working as a chef to chop them up.
Eventually Nilsen boiled the heads, hands, and feet to remove the flesh, then chopped the innards into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet ---- which eventually blocked the drains. The innards were discovered by a worker at a drain company, which eventually led to his arrest.
Called the “Co-ed Killer,” Ed Kemper murdered 10 women from 1964 through 1973. After cutting a swath of terror through California, he finished his spree by murdering his mother, beheading her, and copulating with the head --- a trick he’d pulled with several of his victims.
As a final indignity, he used the head of his mother as a dartboard. He then murdered a friend of his mother and drove around for a while before turning himself in to police. Kemper was charged with eight counts of first – degree murder.
He was found guilty of all the charges and received eight concurrent life sentences. Kemper is serving his time at California Medical Facility in Vacaville.
Russian psychopath, Alexander Pichushkin, killed at least 49 people, and maybe as many as 60. His goal was to kill 64 in total, the same number of squares on a chessboard. Alexander would lure his victims to secluded areas in Bista Park.
After the victims were intoxicated, he would strangle them, drown them in sewage, or drop them from balconies. Alexander was finally caught when he murdered one of his ex-coworkers.
After the prolific hammer killer was finally arrested, police found a chessboard in his hone, and all but one of the squares had a date scrawled into. The dates in each square corresponded to those of the murders he committed.
Alexander eventually confessed to 60 murders --- 11 more than the police found bodies for. He described how killing made him feel powerful and that he felt it necessary for him to kill to survive. He was convicted of 49 murders and 3 attempted murders, with the sentence being life in prison, with the first 15 years being spent in solitary confinement.
Known as the “Lonely Hearts Killer,” Harvey Glatman was active in the 40s and 50s, and would break into women’s apartments, rape them, and take photographs. After a burglary arrest, he moved to Los Angeles, where he continued trolling for victims in newspaper’s lonely hearts sections. He also kept taking pictures.
When caught during a kidnapping, Glatman was arrested, admitted to the killings, and showed police a toolbox full of his pictures. His crimes spanned miles and more than one county. Each of the women Glatman had assaulted had suffered for hours before he killed them. They had to endure multiple rapes and the further humiliation of posing for photographs so that Glatman would have trophies.
Glatman entered a plea of guilty and eloquently argued for his own execution. He was sentenced to death and was electrocuted at San Quentin less than a year later.
The infamous “Blind, Torture, Kill” murderer, Dennis Rader, made copies of the driver’s licenses of several of his victims, and would mail them to the police, along with taunting letters and photographs. It was the writing on these letters that led police to eventually track him.
He collected items from the scenes of the murders he committed and, reportedly, he had no items that were related to any other killings.
On August 18, 2005, Rader was sentenced to serve 10 consecutive life sentences, one life sentence per victim. This included nine life sentences that each had the possibility of parole after 15 years, and one life sentence with the possibility of parole after 40 years. In total, it meant that Rader would be eligible for parole after 175 years of imprisonment.
Souvenirs are usually things you collect to remember some place you visited or given as gifts to loved ones after a vacation. But of course serial killers take souvenirs to a whole other level. Taking mementos of their grisly attacks on other human beings, to wear, sleep with, eat, among other gruesome ideas. Yet doing these things with their souvenirs holds the same meaning to them as buying trinkets to put in our scrapbooks and picture frames, to relive the experiences.
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