By Chris Bartholomew
Experts agree that at any given time, there are at least fifty serial killers operating in the United States. Given that we read and hear about one at a time, as they are killing or as they are caught, it doesn't seem that bad, not really. If you put them in their places though, a different feeling might emerge...
1970's cannibal murderers Stanley Baker and sidekick Henry Stroup, after going thru the prison system they were both paroled and disappeared back from states where they came from. They murdered Harvey Salem in San Francisco in April 1970 and then wrote "Zodiac" and "Satans Slaves" on the wall to throw the police off.
The 80's-90's Bay Area child killer. (unsolved)
Kenneth Bianchi (w/Angelo Buono) Together known as the Hillside Stranglers.
Lawrence Bittaker (w/Roy Norris) 1979, kidnapped, tortured, raped, and murdered five young women over a period of five months.
William Bonin, Vernon Butts and Gregory Miley. Butts was charged in nine murders before he hanged himself in his cell, and Miley was charged in three.
William Richard Bradford. The SK photog from the `80's in Los Angeles.
Carol Bundy (w/ Douglas Clark) "The Sunset Strip Killers"
Ted Bundy (?)
Angelo Buono (w/Kenneth Bianchi) One of the Hillside Stranglers.
Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine went on a killing spree in 1967. They started in Washington State and worked their way down to California. Aug 23 1967 while in California they picked up a couple hitchhiking on Hwy 101 near Ukiah, in Mendocino County. They stopped about six miles south of Ukiah in an area called Burke Hill where they shot Timothy Luce to death and raped then shot Susan Bartolomie five times. She survived but was crippled for the rest of her life. They were caught not long after the Luce and Bartolomie shooting.
David Carpenter, The Trailside Killer
Michael Bear Carson (w/Susan Carson) were serial killers active in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1980's.
Richard Trenton Chase killed six people in the span of a month in California.
Carl Chessman the "Red Light Bandit" was a big influence of the Hillside Stranglers.
Douglas Clark (w/Carol Bundy) The Sunset Strip Murders in Los Angeles
Juan Corona, a killer of migrant workers in Yuba City, California.
Mack Ray Edwards murdered at least six children in Los Angeles County.
Gordon Stewart Northcott, 1930, 23 years old, was hanged for the kidnapping and murder of four young boys on his chicken ranch in Wineville (present-day Mira Loma), California.
Joseph Danks, Koreatown slasher in 1987
Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck 1940's lonely hearts killers, murdered four women and one child.
John Linley Frazier who went on a killing spree in California in the early 1970s. It's a bizarre case, he's been likened to Charles Manson and he appears to have had an interest in astrology along with other occult themes.
Gerald Gallego and Charlene Williams Gallego (active 1978-1982, Sacramento area)
Harvey Glatman, active during the late 1950s
Douglas Gretzler was 25 when he was sentenced to death for murdering a Tucson couple during a spree of 17 killings in California and Arizona.
Ivan Hall, LA, 60 freeway killer 1993-94
Keith Hunter Jesperson "Happy Face Killer"
Kevin and Reginald Haley, LA 8 victims, 1978-84
Patrick Kearney preyed on young men in California during the 1970s. He is sometimes referred to as "The Freeway Killer", a nickname he shares with two other separate serial killers, William Bonin and Randy Steven Kraft.
Edmund Kemper "The Co-ed Killer"
Charles Rathbun killed model Linda Sobek in the `90's. They originally thought he might have killed others.
Roger Kibbe, 'the I-5 Killer' or 'I-5 strangler' who killed several women in the Central valley, during the mid-80s.
Randy Kraft. He was convicted of 16 murders and is strongly suspected of committing at least 51.
Leonard Lake (w/Charles Ng)
Henry Lee Lucas (?)
Herbert Mullin committed 13 murders in California in the early 1970s.
McCrary family was responsible for the rape and shooting deaths of 22 victims from California to Florida between 1971 and 1972. The McCrary family consisted of a husband, wife, son, daughter and the daughter's husband. They were from Texas but by the time they were arrested they were living in Goleta, Santa Barbara County, California. Their murders were known as the Doughnut Shop Murders.
Earle Neilson 1920's west coast
Roy Norris (w/Lawrence Bittaker)
Gerald Parker, the Bedroom Basher, Southern California
Dorothy Puente, 80's Sacramento, killed people in her boarding house and buried them in the garden, for their social security money.
Cleophus Prince Jr San Diego 1990 "The Clairemont" Killer
Ward Weaver III son of a sexual predator who's dad was on death row murdered women, while driving long haul trucks.
Maury Travis was the SK, from St Louis who was tracked down thru the internet. He sent a letter to a newspaper, where a body could be found using a map from the internet, and his email address was encoded in it MSM maurytravis.
Westley Shermantime and Loren Herzog, two speed freaks from Stockton who dumped at least 20 bodies in mine shafts, hillsides and under trailer houses in the 90's.
Cary Stayner, serial killer currently on death row for the 1999 murders of four women in Yosemite.
William Steelman 1970
Morris Solomon Jr. is a convicted serial killer now sitting on death row in San Quentin, California.
William Suff, Riverside Prostitute Killer and the Lake Elsinore Killer
Jack Scully murdered escorts or prostitutes in the 80's and dumped their bodies in steel drums in Golden Gate Park.
Richard Ramirez
Christopher Wilder (?) abducted and raped at least 10 women and killed at least seven of them during a spree across the U.S. in early 1984.
Randy Woodfield, The I-5 Killer or The I-5 Bandit
Astrological murders (N. California) (unsolved)
Grim Sleeper (unsolved)
Los Angeles sniper in 1982, shot victims and without a word went thru their pockets and stuff and then one day simply disappeared, also attacked transients. (unsolved)
Original Nightstalker (unsolved)
Malcolm Joseph Robbins
San Diego prostitute murders (unsolved)
Santa Rosa / Sonoma killer (unsolved)
Southside Slayer (unsolved)
Chester Wayne Turner LA, 12 victims
Jack Unterweger traveled to LA to do a story on prostitutes. He murdered several prostitutes in several countries. He hung himself after being convicted.
Zebra Killers SF, three convicted 78 victims.
Zodiac (unsolved)
Editor's note: this was written in December 2008 and covers California alone, despite the general opening; no other state was written. It is reproduced as written with one entry removed. The original included a name followed by the words "may be a serial killer", a man who has never been charged with any killing, and a bare line of that kind on a page like this is an accusation with nothing behind it. Nothing else has been cut.
Three of the unsolved cases at the foot of the list are no longer unsolved. The Grim Sleeper is Lonnie Franklin Jr, identified in 2010 through California's first familial DNA search and convicted in May 2016 of ten murders and one attempted murder. The Original Night Stalker is Joseph James DeAngelo, who pleaded guilty in June 2020 to thirteen murders and thirteen kidnappings and is serving life without parole. The Zodiac has not been identified, but one of his ciphers was solved in December 2020. Two entries carry the wrong facts. The description under Ward Weaver III, of a long-haul driver whose father was on death row, is his father's history rather than his own. Maury Travis belongs to St Louis, which the entry says itself, and not to a California list.
On the figures, this archive records: Northcott convicted of three murders, not four, and hanged on October 2, 1930; Chester Turner fourteen convictions across two trials rather than twelve; Kibbe seven convictions, one in 1991 and six in 2009 when DNA reached the rest of the series, and strangled by his cellmate in 2021; Corona twenty-five; Mullin eleven to thirteen; Suff twelve murder convictions at San Diego in 1995; Kraft sixteen convictions with up to sixty-seven attributed; Kearney twenty-one convictions and thirty-five confessed; Loren Herzog's three convictions overturned in 2004 because his confession had been improperly obtained, after which he pleaded to voluntary manslaughter; Cary Stayner convicted of one Yosemite murder in federal court and three in state court; Earle Nelson, spelled so, hanged in Winnipeg in 1928; and Dorothea Puente, spelled so, three convictions with up to nine attributed. Christopher Wilder was never tried at all. He died resisting capture in April 1984 with eight deaths attributed, so the question mark beside his name should be read as covering the whole of it. John Linley Frazier killed five people in a single attack, which is not a series on this archive's definition. Caryl Chessman, whose name is spelled Carl here, was executed in 1960 for kidnapping and rape and killed nobody.
One name on the list connects to another article on this site. Gerald Parker, the Bedroom Basher, was matched in 1996 when California ran its unsolved cases against the state offender DNA database. He confessed to six attacks, and one of them cleared Kevin Lee Green, who had served seventeen years for the killing of his own unborn child and the attack on his wife. That case is one of the twelve in TWELVE CASES WHERE THE CONVICTION DID NOT HOLD.