This list of married serial killers includes some of the most notorious criminals in history. From the BTK to the Green River Killer, this list of serial killers who had wives or husbands includes criminals like John Wayne Gacy, Dennis Rader and Robert Lee Yates.
Linda Yates says she never suspected anything more than infidelity from her husband Robert Lee Yates when, in 1999, she caught him burning credit card statements that included charges from seedy hotels. Linda’s biggest shock came on the day police arrested her husband and informed her that a victim had been found buried outside her bedroom window.
Yates, a father of five and former Air National Guard helicopter pilot, is awaiting execution for the murders of two women. Yates confessed and pleaded guilty to 13 other murders in Spokane, Walla Walla, and Skagit counties.
Yates is currently on death row in Washington State.
Julie Baumeister had some suspicion that something wasn’t right when her 13-year-old son discovered a human skull while playing on the family’s property. Julie confronted her husband, to whom she had been married for 23 years, and asked for an explanation.
Herb replied that it was a relic of his deceased father’s medical career. The bones eventually disappeared and Julie thought that animals had carried them off. Haunted by the discovery, Julie let police search their property.
They found the remains of 11 gay men who had been lured away from bars in Indianapolis. Herb was a family man who also frequented gay bars. Investigators have concluded that Herb had also killed nine other men whose bodies were found dumped along rural roads in Indiana and Ohio.
Most of the 20 dead men were gay. Herb never returned home after the discovery on his property, but instead, slipped into Canada and committed suicide in 1996. He was 49.
In 1964, Gacy became manager of a shoe store where he met his first wife, Marlynn Myers. Marylynn gave birth to two healthy children, a son and a daughter. When Gacy was charged with committing sodomy on two young boys, his wife left him.
On the surface it appeared that Gacy was rebuilding his life. He met Carole Huff, the divorced mother of two little girls, who would soon become the second Mrs. Gacy. After John and Carole became man and wife, she and her two children were to remain in the death house for the next four years.
Carole was completely unaware that her husband could only gain sexual gratification by killing. She decided not to stick out her marriage to John Wayne Gacy. After four years she divorced him due to his bizarre behavior, uncontrollable rage, and admitted homosexuality.
Gacy was executed by the state of Illinois in 1994.
Dennis Rader married his wife Paula in 1971. Three years after they married he began killing. In 2005, he was finally caught and revealed to be Dennis Rader, a seemingly average married father of two. Known as the BTK Killer (Blind -Torture-Kill), Rader stopped killing in 1991, but continued to taunt police with phone calls and cryptic letters into 2004.
Paula divorced him in 2005, the same year those taunts caught up to him and he was arrested. Rader pled guilty to all of the charges on June 27, 2005. As part of his plea, he gave the horrifying details of his crimes in court.
Many observers noted the way he described the gruesome events without any sign of remorse or emotion. He escaped the death penalty because he committed his crimes before the state’s reinstatement of the death penalty. Rader is currently serving 10 life sentences in a Kansas prison.
Judith Mawson and Gary Ridgway met in 1975 and married three years later. Judith said during their married life together Ridgway always came home on time, always turned over his full paycheck, spent the weekends with her camping or going to garage sales, and he was romantic.
Judith said she thinks Ridgway had a split personality. She said “I miss the man I knew . . . I hate the man who took him away from me.” She described him as the “perfect husband” but accepted a lot of questionable excuses from him during their marriage.
When he replaced the carpet in their house, he said their kids had messed it up. When their bed was replaced, he told her an old girlfriend had come back to reclaim her property. When police detained him several times in connection with the disappearance of prostitutes, he told her it was because he “looked like somebody. “
Mawson even refused to believe Ridgway was guilty when he was arrested and only filed for divorce when he eventually confessed to 49 murders. Ridgway is serving 49 consecutive life sentences in Washington state.
Around the age of 22, Brudos married and moved to Portland, Oregon. The couple had two children. Darcie Brudos spent eight years married to Jerry and never thought to call the cops when local girls started turning up dead and her husband coincidentally brought home an actual female breast to keep as a paperweight.
While Jerry was certifiably crazy, Darcie had some mental issues herself. Jerry forbade her from going into the attic or garage without first getting permission and announcing her presence on an intercom. She obeyed his every command, including when he told her to remain in the house naked and wear only high-heeled shoes.
Darcie also never heard her husband suspend girls from hooks in the ceiling, dress them up, sexually abuse them, and then eventually strangle them to death. His wife divorced him in 1970, and left the state with their two children. She has since changed her name. Jerry Brudos died in 2006 from liver cancer.
In August 1969, at age 22, Peter Tobin married his first wife Margaret Mountney, age 17, in Brighton. She is with him for a year. It is reported that Tobin raped her three or four times, stabbing her and leaving her for dead. A downstairs neighbor rescues her after seeing blood coming through the ceiling.
In 1973, Tobin marries 30-year-old nurse, Sylvia Jeffries in Brighton. They have a daughter who dies and a son. Sylvia leaves him after three years, taking the boy with her, who is also to have understood to have died.
Cathy Wilson spent three hellish years married to Peter Tobin, who she didn’t think was capable of killing anyone, despite his mental and physical abuse toward her and his tendency to bring home prostitutes to rough up.
Tobin was 22 years older than Cathy when they married and he would do everything from throw his dinner at her to slamming her against the wall, and nearly strangling her. When she threatened to leave him, he wouldn’t let her out of his sight and warned her he would kill her and their toddler son if she went anywhere.
He even dangled the child over a banister to prove his point. Tobin banned his wife from going in to the basement and she never questioned it, despite the foul stench and the drains getting clogged for no reason.
Tobin was eventually convicted of drug and sex charges and served 10 years in prison. Within days of his release, he had killed again and after that it didn’t take long for police to (finally) figure out he was the reason local girls were disappearing. Tobin is currently serving a life sentence in Edinburgh Prison in Scotland.
Russell Williams had a long, apparently loving marriage. He was a well-respected colonel in the Canadian Armed Forces, and his wife, Mary Elizabeth, had no reason to suspect her panty-stealing, cross-dressing husband was a rapist and a murderer.
The couple owned two homes and both were filled with momentos of his crimes. Williams went from fetishes burglaries to stalking to sexual assaults without penetration to rape and murder ---- all within two years.
Williams was newly married, and had an infant son at the time of his arrest. He was convicted and sentenced to two life sentences, an additional 10 years each for two counts of sexual assault and forcible confinement, and 82 years for breaking and entering.
Alice Carignan gets credit for divorcing her husband after just over a year of marriage, after she and her two kids endured beatings at his hand. Her youngest son was the smartest of the bunch, as he grew tired of it and went to go live with his birth father after just two months.
Alice got out just in time, as “Harv the Hammer’s” next girlfriend was found dead in the woods with multiple hammer blows to the head. Harvey was sentenced to death in Alaska in 1949 for a rape and murder he committed while in the US Army, but had the decision reversed in 1951, and was paroled in 1960.
Due to Minnesota state law, he was required to serve 40 years of his 150 year sentence beginning in 1975, meaning that in 2015, at age 88, he would be released.
While authorities think that Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo may have raped, murdered, and eaten as many as 100 people, Fayina, his wife of 30 years, contends she didn’t have a clue. Police presented a ton of evidence that finally jogged Fayina’s memory.
Repeated blood stains on his clothes, Andrei getting fired from his teaching job for molesting children, and police continually bringing him in for questioning in regards to his numerous murders, were the memories that were jogged.
He told Fayina that he was sexually impotent, so they couldn’t be intimate and she believed him. Imagine her surprise when police told her that his crimes were of a sexual nature. He was convicted and executed by gunshot in 1994.
His real name was Herman Mudget but he’s better known as Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, one of the first documented serial killers in modern times. Holmes opened a hotel, which he designed himself specifically for murder, and while he confessed to 27 murders, his actual kill count is thought to be as high as 200 people.
Some guests were locked in there sound-proof room fixed with gas lines, and left to asphyxiate, while others suffocated in a large bank vault. Bodies were dropped down a secret chute to the basement where they were dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeletal models, and then sold to medical schools.
It was revealed that he had multiple wives, who were sometimes pretty but always wealthy. One such wife was Minnie Williams whose estate was worth at least $75,000. Both she and her sister went missing.
Julia Conner was a bookkeeper in one of his stores. He seduced her, breaking up her marriage and sending her husband packing. Both Julia and her daughter Pearl went missing in 1893.
A killer, rapist, and cannibal known by many nicknames, Fish once boasted he “had children in every state, “ though it is not known if he was referring to rapes or cannibalization, or if the statement’s even true.
In 1890, his mother arranged a marriage for him, to a woman who was nine years younger than he, and they had six children together. In January 1917, Fish’s wife left him for John Straube, a handyman who boarded with the Fish family.
Fish then had to raise his children as a single parent. After his arrest, Fish told a newspaper that when his wife left him she took nearly every possession the family owned.
A Canadian serial killer and rapist, Bernardo and his girlfriend Karla Homolka, terrorized Toronto throughout the late 80s and early 90s. Bernardo engaged in at least 15 attempts of sexual assault in the late 80s, including 10 rapes of teenage girls and early 20-something women.
In 1990, he became engaged to and eventually married Karla and the duo set about torturing and killing Karla’s sister, Tammy. Karla testified as a witness against Paul in exchange for a 12-year prison sentence.
In what was known as “The Deal with the Devil,” Paul’s father felt Karla was more involved with the homicides than the justice system made her pay for. While his son is “ doing his time like a man,” it irks him that Paul’s former wife is free living on the island of Guadeloupe with a new husband and children.
Paul is serving a life sentence in Millhaven Maximum Security Prison, in a small cell where he sits for 23 hours a day, with one hour for yard time.
In June 1927, Petiot married Georgette Lablais, the 23-year-old daughter of a wealthy land owner in nearby Seignlay. Their only son, Gerhardt, was born the following April.
Another doctor who moonlighted as a serial killer, Petiot was convicted of multiple murders after the discovery of the remains of 23 people in his home in Paris during World War II. His crimes came as a surprise to both his wife and other women with whom he worked who described him as “so sweet, so calm.”
He later stated that he’d had around 60 victims throughout his life, although the true number remains unknown. In March 1944, Petroit’s neighbors in Rue Le Sueur, complained to police about a stench in the area and large amounts of smoke coming from Petroit’s house.
Fearing a chimney fire, police summoned the fire department who entered the house and found human remains scattered in the fire and in the basement. Petroit was executed by guillotine in 1946.
A habitual liar since her teenage years, Kristen Gilbert would often fake suicide attempts to manipulate people. She graduated from community college with a nursing degree and went to work at the Veterans Medical Center in Massachusetts.
She was dubbed “Angel of Death” by fellow nurses, due to the high number of deaths that occurred during her watch. Gilbert was eventually convicted of causing fatal heart attacks in four patients. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus 20 additional years.
Gilbert left her husband and two children for a lover in the midst of her then-undetected killing spree. She could have faced death by lethal injection and would have become the only woman on federal death row. Her father and her grandmother’s pleaded with jurors to let her live, saying a death sentence would be devastating to them and Gilbert’s two sons.
In 1947, Dr. Robert George Clements, a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, murdered his fourth wife for money. After his first three wives died of suspicious circumstances, Clements married Amy Burnette, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Burnette fell ill and was taken to a nursing home where she died the next day.
Both the doctor and Clements diagnosed her with myeloid leukemia. However, three of Clements’ four wives were wealthy women who we left penniless at the time of their deaths. A second autopsy on Burnette discovered she had suffered from morphine poisoning.
Clements committed suicide via morphine before police could arrest him, do he never stood trial for any of the killings.
Marybeth Tinning was suspected, but never tried or convicted, in the deaths of seven of her eight children over a 14 year period. At the time, she lived with her children and husband in Schenectady, NY. She allegedly admitted to killing three of her children, but was only convicted in the 1985 death of her daughter Tami Lynne, who was smothered.
Tinning was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison, and though she has attempted parole five times, it has been denied each time. During a meeting with Mr. And Mrs. Tinning, Joseph told his wife he would “stand by her and support her no matter what she had done.”
And there you have it – the moment when you realize you don’t really know your spouse. These killers were so deceiving to their significant other that they didn’t have a clue. How well do you know the person you thought you knew well enough to marry and have children with? When gut instinct tells you something isn’t right, you’re gut is probably right. Be careful when choosing your life partner cause it just may cost you your life.
All of our Serial Killer Magazines and books are massive, perfect bound editions. These are not the kind of flimsy magazines or tiny paperback novels that you are accustomed to. These are more like giant, professionally produced graphic novels.
We are happy to say that the Serial Killer Trading Cards are back! This 90 card set features the artwork of 15 noted true crime artists and will come with a numbered, signed certificate of authenticity for each set. get yours now before they are gone forever.
SERIAL KILLER MAGAZINE is an official release of the talented artists and writers at SerialKillerCalendar.com. It is chock full of artwork, rare documents, FBI files and in depth articles regarding serial murder. It is also packed with unusual trivia, exclusive interviews with the both killers and experts in the field and more information that any other resource available to date. Although the magazine takes this subject very seriously and in no way attempts to glorify the crimes describe in it, it also provides a unique collection of rare treats (including mini biographical comics, crossword puzzles and trivia quizzes). This is truly a one of a kind collectors item for anyone interested in the macabre world of true crime, prison art or the strange world of murderabelia.
All of our Serial Killer books are massive, 8.5" x 11" perfect bound editions. These are not the kind of tiny paperback novels that you are accustomed to. These are more like giant, professionally produced graphic novels.
We are now looking for artists, writers and interviewers to take part in the world famous Serial Killer Magazine. If you are interested in joining our team, contact us at MADHATTERDESIGN@GMAIL.COM
