TEACHERS TURNED SERIAL KILLERS

Article BY LORI BELL

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This is a list of serial killers who started off in the right profession, but somehow decided killing was the choice profession. Why these individuals chose the latter is hard to understand. But what is harder to comprehend is the thought of your child being taught by these monsters, and becoming their role model.

 

Ronald Janssen

Ronald Janssen, a 38-year-old technical drawing teacher, who was described as quiet and withdrawn, could be Belgium’s latest serial killer. The divorced father-of -two has been nicknamed “Le Prof,” and has confessed to several murders.

The teacher allegedly told police he began killing in the 1990s when he was a student, and has provided gruesome descriptions of his crimes---but no names or dates, saying he “can’t remember. “ The widening investigation has been compared to the notorious Marc Dutroux case, the serial killer who traumatized Belgium when he abused and murdered four girls ages eight to 19 during the 1990s.

Detectives believe they were dealing with a Jekyll and Hyde character, a popular teacher and father who is concerned about the effect the media coverage of his crimes is having on his daughters, aged eight and 11 when he confessed.

Janssen told police he murdered an 18-year-old student in 2007. He is also being linked to 15 other killings, usually the rape and murder of young women, and is suspected of committing twenty rapes since 2001.

The student, Annick van Uytsel, was stopped by Janssen as she was walking home late one night and forced her at gunpoint to get into his car. He imprisoned her in his cellar for several hours. After raping her and bludgeoning her to death, he attached weights to her body, wrapped her in plastic and dumped her in a canal. The body was discovered a year later. She had been beaten to death.

Janssen was arrested after his neighbor Shana Appeltans, 18, and her fiance’ Kevin Paulus, 22, were found dead in their burnt-out car on New Year’s Day, in his home town of Halan. They had both been shot.

Prosecutors are trying to link Janssen to the murders of two 24-year-old girls at Louvian University, near Brussels, while he was studying there in the 1990s. Both victims were stabbed to death. He is also suspected of two teenagers and three women in their twenties, which date back to 1991.

Prosecutors are trying to link Janssen to the murders of two 24-year-old girls at Louvian University, near Brussels, while he was studying there in the 1990s. Both victims were stabbed to death. Detectives reopened an investigation into the 2006 disappearance, and suspected murder, of Tamara Morris, 27.

He is also suspected of a missing student, Tanja Groen from Maastricht, Holland, who vanished in 1993 as she was cycling home from a party. No body has ever been recovered. Prosecutors across Belgium have reopened the files for two unsolved abduction murders, of Ingrid Caeckaert, 27, stabbed in 1991 and Carola Titze, 16, murdered in 1996.

“Investigators fear particularly that it will not stop and that this is rather the beginning of a long list of Janssen’s crimes,” the De Standaard newspaper reported. Janssen was sentenced to life in prison on October 21, 2011.

 

Richard Lindwall

Richard Lindwall, 34, a science teacher at Glenbrook North High School and onetime foster parent for the Illinois Department of Children and Foandly Services, was charged with the murder of a Chicago policeman’s teen-age son and with kidnapping four other youths.

The husky, bearded Lindwall taught science for seven years at the junior high school before going to the high school in 1977. Although students described him as shy and a bit withdrawn, they also described him as always approachable.

Lindwall was always eager to hear and talk to students about their problems or to discuss his favorite subjects. No student said they had heard anything the least bit strange or suspect about the teacher.

Lindwall detailed a painful adolescents during which he considered himself a “freak of nature,” and suffered the constant taunts of classmates over the size of his breasts. He also described himself as sexually naïve .

“In the beginning it was almost like I was conducting my own personal sex education class. I found everything I was doing completely repulsive. I could not stop.” Lindwall said he picked up his first victim in August 1978, “without any thought.”

The Cook County grand jury indicted Lindwall for the April 1978 kidnap-murder and deviate sexual assault on Jefferson Wesley, 17, the son of Chicago Patrolman George Wesley, and for two other kidnappings. The Lake County grand jury also indicted Lindwall for the same charges.

Jefferson Wesley had vanished April 9, 1978, shortly after being seen hitchhiking in Lake County. The grand juries of the two counties indicted Lindwall for the same murder because authorities are not certain in which county the murder took place.

Police were pouring over extensive records of missing youths to learn if there is any link between the youths and Lindwall. They were certain he kidnapped other boys and wanted to find out if he killed any of them.

Judge James M. Bailey, of Cook County Circuit Court, ruled that Lindwall would be kept in the Cook County Jail’s hospital, at the request of the public defender who is acting tempo-as his defense lawyer. John Wayne Gacy was also held in this hospital. Lindwall was sentenced to natural life in prison with no hope for parole.

 

Ray Shawn Jackson

Ray Shawn Jackson followed in the footsteps of his older brother by going to college and getting a teaching certificate. Everything seemed to be going well until the summer of 1895, when two things happened that pushed him over the edge and into true psychosis.

First, his favorite uncle was run over by a railroad train, literally running over his head while Jackson watched. Second, he was caught forging vouchers and was eventually sent to the state penitentiary for two years.

Jackson was released in 1898, but a year later he was back in again, this time for a robbery committed in Baker County. His bad reputation included the entire Willamette Valley, plus Jackson and Josephine counties in the south, and Baker County in the east.

There wasn’t much of Oregon left in which Jackson could get a fresh start. But the remote stock land of Lake County was different. Hard characters often came to Lake County to get away from reputations they’d forged in other places.

Now as Jackson left the state pen for the last time, he did exactly that. He took a job teaching first through eighth grade at Silver Lake. Jackson soon established a reputation as a strict disciplinarian. He confided to a neighbor that he always took his single-action Colt revolver and baseball bat to class with him.

Jackson’s run as Silver Lake’s schoolteacher was relatively short; he was elected superintendent of Lake County schools. Two years later he was indicted for embezzling money from the district, and he resigned in 1911. He never went back to teaching school.

The most extraordinary part of Jackson’s life was his personal involvement in at least six suspicious homicides. Three of which were declared suicides and three which remain officially unsolved. His own death was also declared a suicide in 1938.

 

Mohan Kumar

Mohan Kumar, of Kanata village in Dakshina Kannada district, confessed to murdering 18 women for “carnal pleasures and money.” He was a primary physical education teacher for 23 years, and had two wives and four children. Kumar was also known as Cyanide Mohan, a serial killer who preyed on women looking for marriage.

Apart from murder, he was also alleged to have been involved in bank loan frauds and forgeries. Mohan started stalking young women at temples, shops, and marriage halls in small towns in Dakshina Kannada and Kasargod districts.

Mohan lured women from the lower middle class into a love pact and took them to different places like Bangalore, Mysore, Hassan and Madikeri. He would kill them by giving them cyanide pills, claiming they were contraceptives, and rob them of their jewelry.

Ten of his victims were killed at Mysore bus stand, two each at Bangalore and Hassan bus stands, three in Madikeri bus stand, and one in Kollur temple in Udupi district. He would make the girl consume cyanide in the bathroom of the bus stand and wait there for three minutes to ensure his victims never returned.

Most of these cases looked like some dejected women had committed suicide at the bus stand. Strangely, the families had said that the girls from their homes were having an affair with Mohan. Because of this, evidence surfaced that there had been some clues in the past about Mohan involvement in the murders.

Mohan was charged with 20 murders and defended himself in court. He was sentenced to death in December 2013.

 

Andrei Chikatilo

Andrei Chikatilo was a soviet serial killer. He was also known as the Rostov Ripper, Butcher of Rostov, and the Red Ripper, because the majority of his murders were committed in the Rostov Oblast of the Russian SFSR.

In 1970, Chikatilo completed a correspondence course in Russian literature and obtained his degree in the subject from Rostov University. He began his career as a teacher of Russian language and literature in Novoshakhtinsk.

He was unable to maintain discipline in his classes and was regularly subjected to mockery by his students who, he claimed, took advantage of his modest nature. In May 1973, Chikatilo committed his first known sexual assault upon one of his students.

Chikatilo was not disciplined for this incident, or for fondling himself in the presence of his students, or for repeatedly entering the girls’ dormitory in the hope of seeing them undressed. Months later, he sexual assaulted another teenage girl whom he had locked in a classroom.

In response to the numerous complaints lodged against him by students, the director of the school summoned him to a formal meeting and informed him he should resign voluntarily, or be fired. Chikatilo left discreetly and found another job as a teacher in January 1974.

Chikatilo career as a teacher ended in March 1981 following several complaints of child molestation against students of both sexes. His next job required him to travel extensively across much of the Soviet Union .

In September 1978, Chikatilo committed his first documented murder in a coal-mining town near Rostov-on-Don. On December 22, he lured a 9-year-old girl into an old house he secretly purchased. He attempted to rape her but failed an erection. When she struggled, he choked her and stabbed her three times in the abdomen. Chikatilo strangled her to death and threw her body into a nearby river. Her body was found two days later

Chikatilo admitted he was able to achieve sexual arousal and orgasm only through stabbing and slashing women and children to death, and he later claimed that the urge to relive the experience had overwhelmed him. Initially he claimed he tried to resist these urges.

Chikatilo no longer attempted to resist his homicidal urges between July and September, 1982. He established a pattern of approaching children, runaways, and young vagrants at bus or railway stations, enticing them to a nearby forest or other secluded area.

He killed them usually by stabbing, slashing, and eviiscerating the victim with a knife. Some victims were also strangled or battered to death. Many of the victims bore evidence of mutilation to the eye sockets

Chikatilo’s adult female victims were often prostitutes or homeless women whom he would lure to secluded areas with promises of alcohol or money. His child victims were of both sexes. After the killing, he would make rudimentary ---- though seldom serious --- efforts to conceal the body before leaving the crime scene.

Chikatilo did not kill again until June 1983, and by that September he had killed a further five victims. On September 6, 1983, the public prosecutor of the USSR formally linked six of the murders, thus far committed, to the same killer.

On September 13, 1984, exactly one week after his 15th killing of the year, he was observed by an undercover detective attempting to lure young women from a bus station. He was arrested and held. On October 8, 1984, he was formally linked to 23 murders.

On November 30, 1985, Chikatilo confessed to 34 of the 36 murders linked to him. He gave a full, detailed description of each murder. Over the following days, he confessed to a further 22 killings which had not been connected to the case.

Chikatilo was brought to trial in Rostov on April 14,1992, charged with 53 counts of murder in addition to five charges of sexual assault against minors committed when he had been a teacher. On October 15, 1987, he was formally sentenced to death plus 86 years for the 52 murders and five counts of sexual assault for which he had been found guilty.

On February 14, 1984, Chikatilo was taken from his death row cell to a soundproofed room in Novocherkassak prison and executed with a single gunshot behind the right ear.

As I wrote this article I was disgusted with the way these monsters murdered children and women, without remorse. Teachers are always looked upon as mentors or role models, not as someone who looks upon their students as possible victims. Goes to show that it doesn’t matter what background a serial killer comes from because they ultimately choose killing as their career choice.