By Bryan Burr
#10: Ahmad Suradji LOCATION: Indonesia YEARS OF KILLING: 1986-1997 CONFIRMED VICTIMS: 42 POSSIBLE VICTIMS: 70-80+ NOTES: Convicted of strangling at least 42 women and girls in a series of ritual slayings he believed would give him magical powers. Executed by firing squad on 11 July 2008.
#9: Alexander Pichushkin LOCATION: Russia YEARS OF KILLING: 1992-2006 CONFIRMED VICTIMS: 48 POSSIBLE VICTIMS: 60 NOTES: Known as the Chessboard Killer. Convicted of murdering 48 victims and suspected of killing 60. Claimed to have murdered 62 people, because he didn’t know that two of his victims had survived; stated goal of becoming Russia’s most prolific serial killer.
#8: Gary Ridgeway LOCATION: United States YEARS OF KILLING: 1982-2000 CONFIRMED VICTIMS: 49 POSSIBLE VICTIMS: 71-90+ NOTES: Truck painter who confessed to killing 71 women. The United States’ most prolific serial killer; also known as The Green River Killer. He almost exclusively targeted sex workers from Seattle. Suspected of killing over 90 victims, confessed to 71, convicted of 49.
#7: Anatoly Onoprienko LOCATION: Soviet Union/Ukraine YEARS OF KILLING: 1989-1996 CONFIRMED VICTIMS: 52 POSSIBLE VICTIMS: 52+ NOTES: Known as "The Beast of Ukraine", "The Terminator" and "Citizen O". Convicted of the murders of 9 people in 1989 and 43 people in 1995 to 1996. Sentenced to death, later commuted to life. Traveled through Europe illegally from 1990 to 1995; whether he killed during this time is unknown.
#6: Andrei Chikatilo LOCATION: Soviet Union/Russia YEARS OF KILLING: 1978-1990 CONFIRMED VICTIMS: 53 POSSIBLE VICTIMS: 56 NOTES: Known as Butcher of Rostov, The Red Ripper or The Rostov Ripper. Convicted of the murder of 53 women and children between 1978 and 1990. Executed in 1994. Another man was previously convicted and executed for his crimes.
#5: Yang Xinhai LOCATION: China YEARS OF KILLING: 2000-2003 CONFIRMED VICTIMS: 67 NOTES: Would enter victims’ homes at night and kill everyone with axes, meat cleavers, hammers, and shovels. Executed in February 2004. Known as the "Monster Killer".
#4: Pedro Rodrigues Filho LOCATION: Brazil YEARS OF KILLING: 1967-2003 CONFIRMED VICTIMS: 71 POSSIBLE VICTIMS: 100+ NOTES: Convicted and sentenced to 128 years, but the maximum one can serve in Brazil is 30 years. He has claimed to have killed over 100 victims, 47 of them inmates. He also killed his father and ate a piece of his heart. He killed his first two victims at the age of 14; he was first arrested in 1973.
#3: Daniel Camargo LOCATION: Columbia/Ecuador YEARS OF KILLING: 1974-1986 CONFIRMED VICTIMS: 72 POSSIBLE VICTIMS: 150 NOTES: Child-murderer, believed to have possibly raped and killed over 150 victims, primarily young virgin girls. Confessed to killing 72 victims, and incarcerated with Pedro Alonso Lopez. Considered to be intelligent, and believed to have been motivated to kill from his stepmother abusing him as a child. He strangled young girls in Colombia and was arrested, but he escaped from prison and he started killing in Ecuador; rearrested in 1989, he was killed in jail.
#2: Pedro Lopez LOCATION: Columbia/Ecuador/Peru YEARS OF KILLING: 1969-1980 CONFIRMED VICTIMS: 110 POSSIBLE VICTIMS: 310-350+ NOTES: Child-murderer and rapist, known as "The Monster of the Andes". Targeted young girls, between the ages of 8 and 12. Arrested in 1980 and convicted in 1983 of killing 110 young girls but confessed to killing 300, exact total unknown. Though he may be the most prolific serial killer of the 20th century, he was released in 1998. Current whereabouts unknown.
#1: Luis Garavito LOCATION: Colombia YEARS OF KILLING: 1990’s CONFIRMED VICTIMS: 138 POSSIBLE VICTIMS: 172-400+ NOTES: Child-murderer, torture-killer, and rapist known as "La Bestia" ("The Beast"). Convicted of killing 138 victims but suspected of murdering over 400 victims, mostly street children. Garavito served one of his sentences, but there are another 20 prosecutions against him preventing his release. Additionally, the Ley de Infancia y Adolescencia eliminates the possibility of his release.
Editor's note: this list ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written. Its “confirmed” column mixes two very different things, convictions and confessions, and on four entries the difference is large enough to matter. Daniel Camargo Barbosa has two convictions in this archive, not seventy two; seventy one is what he confessed to and the upper estimate here holds at one hundred and eighty. Pedro Rodrigues Filho's seventy one is the figure usually accepted, but the great majority of those deaths were never tried as murder. Luis Alfredo Garavito is recorded here at one hundred and thirty eight convictions, more than one hundred and ninety three confirmed and two hundred and twenty one claimed by him, so the four hundred in this list is above anything the roster supports. Pedro Alonso Lopez was convicted of one hundred and ten, but only fifty three bodies were recovered. Andrei Chikatilo was convicted of fifty two counts, not fifty three, and this archive gives fifty two to fifty six. The other figures hold: Suradji at forty two, Pichushkin at forty eight convictions, Ridgway at forty nine, Onoprienko at fifty two, Yang Xinhai at sixty seven. The list spells Gary Ridgway as Ridgeway and Colombia as Columbia, and both are left as printed. One line here deserves more weight than it is given. Chikatilo's entry notes in passing that another man was convicted and executed for his crimes. That was Aleksandr Kravchenko, shot in 1983, and he has no entry in this archive. One more thing the reader is owed. The companion list this author wrote for the magazine, covering killers before 1900, carries a stray footnote marker and a “citation needed” tag in its text, which means it was assembled from Wikipedia. That file is held and will not be published here; what it covered has instead been entered in the archive as case files, the last of which, Francisco Guerrero Perez, was written from the record in August 2026. This list shows no such marks, but it was written by the same hand in the same format, so read it as a compiled list rather than reported work. Anyone who wants the case rather than the ranking should go to the archive entry or to the articles written on these men individually: Andrei Chikatilo has one here, so do Gary Ridgway and Luis Alfredo Garavito, and the roster carries a file on every name in the list with the convicted count kept separate from the claimed one.
A note on the byline. This article is bylined Bryan Burr, which is how it ran. A manuscript matching it also sits in the contributor folder of Jaime Cannon, marked for issue 29, and the magazine's own records do not show which of the two the published version came from. Both are credited here: Bryan Burr as the published author, and Jaime Cannon for the submission of the same title held in her folder. If the printed issue settles it, the byline will be corrected.
Credit note: this list is published under Bryan Burr’s byline, which is how it ran in the magazine. The manuscript for it is filed in Jaime Cannon’s submission folder, marked for issue 29. The archive has not been able to establish which of the two prepared the text that ran, so both are recorded here rather than the byline being changed on folder evidence alone.