Table of contents for Serial Killers in Serial Killers

Charles Manson walked out of prison in 1967 after a stint for check forgery and drifted to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, the center of the counterculture, where he went on the prowl for followers. Short, skinny, semiliterate and a lifelong petty criminal, Manson possessed an undeniable charisma, particularly for young women and girls on the fringes of society—outcasts and runaways, often with family troubles and suffering from low self-esteem. He plied them with drugs, had sex with them, and indoctrinated them in a belief system that was a mishmash of hostility toward the establishment, fear of a Black uprising and a love of The Beatles’ music. An often-changing cast of a dozen or so women and girls were used as bait to lure men into the fold. Around 1968, Manson…

It was time, she said, to die for her sins. Nine years after she was sentenced to death, America’s most infamous female serial killer abandoned all hope, confessing to a string of murders and requesting the termination of her legal appeals. “I have hate crawling through my system,” Aileen Wuornos wrote in a petition to the Florida Supreme Court in 2001. “I’m competent, sane and I’m trying to tell the truth. I’m one who seriously hates human life and would kill again.” Her horrific story, which would inspire the 2003 Charlize Theron movie Monster, began in Michigan when she was born to a teenage mother and a child molester father who killed himself in jail. Wuornos and her older brother—with whom she was having an incestuous relationship—were raised by an…

Judias “Judy” Buenoano washed down a last meal of asparagus, broccoli and strawberries with 1 hot he tea and was strapped into the electric chair at Florida State Prison. Asked if ii she had a final statement, the 54-year-old replied, “No, sir.” The executioner threw the switch, and on March 30, 1998, Buenoano became the first woman put to death in Florida since 1848, for the murder of an ex-husband but tied to the killings of several other men in her life. Raised in Texas, the beautician received the death penalty for the 1971 murder of her husband James Goodyear, a U.S. Air Force sergeant whose death was initially thought to be from natural causes—but which later got ta a closer look when another man in Buenoano’s life nearly died…

Lucy Letby wrote a sympathy card to parents whose baby she killed. She Left Post-it Notes About Her Crimes Why did she do it? Lucy Letby’s crimes defy understanding. A nurse in the neonatal unit of Countess of Chester Hospital in northern England, Letby murdered seven children under her care—five baby boys and two little girls—from 2015 to 2016. The 33-year-old woman preyed on the most vulnerable of victims, premature babies, by injecting them with insulin or force-feeding them milk that their fragile bodies couldn’t handle. Letby even went after siblings, killing twins and two of three triplets. “There was a deep malevolence bordering on sadism in your actions,” said the judge in sentencing her to life without the possibility of release in 2023. Yet for all the investigations and…

Since childhood, Martha Beck had been vilified, demonized and ultimately fetishized because of her weight. Newspapers expressed shock that any man could love, much less be sexually attracted to, the woman dubbed “Big Martha.” When such a man entered her life, Beck’s blind devotion ultimately sent her to the electric chair, officially for the murders of two adults and a child, but she was likely responsible for at least 17 more, as she and her lover preyed on women as desperate for love as she had once been. Raised in Florida, Beck ran away from home after her brother raped her and embarked on fleeting and failed sexual encounters that produced two children. Trained as a nurse, she couldn’t get hired by hospitals because of her weight, which at various…

Everybody in town knew their reputation. Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog were hell-raising, best-friend bullies in high school who graduated to even worse behavior when they developed a taste for amphetamines and booze. They hung out at a saloon called the Linden Inn in their hometown of Linden, a community of 2,000 in California’s breadbasket, the San Joaquin Valley, and it was in this bar that their terror streak began. In 1998, the saloon owner’s daughter, 25-year-old Cyndi Vanderheiden, went missing, and police quickly turned their attention to the two local troublemakers, particularly Shermantine, who had briefly dated Cyndi’s sister. A few weeks later, police searched Shermantine’s car when it got repossessed and found traces of Vanderheiden’s blood. Both men were grilled by investigators, and it was Herzog who cracked…

From Hell The Hughes Brothers brought Eddie Moore and Alan Campbell’s graphic novel From Hell to life in 2001 with their visceral slasher flick starring Johnny Depp as lead investigator Frederick Abberline and Heather Graham as victim Mary Jane Kelly. The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog Long before making classics like Rear Window and Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock helped shape the thriller genre with his 1927 silent film starring Ivor Novello and centered on The Avenger, a Jack-like serial killer who targets young women in London. Whitechapel A modern take on the long-beloved detective drama, the 2009 ITV series followed a team of detectives led by Rupert Penry-Jones’ Joseph Chandler who sought to bring a Jack the Ripper copycat to justice. Despite receiving critical acclaim, the show was canceled…

After her marriage, at age 15, to Count Ferenc Nádasdy in 1575, the high-born Hungarian Elizabeth Báthory moved into her new home, a 13th-century hilltop castle located in what is now Slovakia. It had been given to the elite couple as a wedding present. When her husband went off to fight the Ottomans as a commander of the Hungarian forces, the rich and beautiful Báthory soon found herself alone and bored in big old Čachtice Castle. To keep herself occupied, she took several lovers, then ventured into much darker pursuits. Luring peasant girls to the castle, Báthory tortured them, burning them with tongs, plunging them into ice water, smearing them with honey and leaving them outside to be attacked by ants. In time, Báthory’s thirst for violence only increased. Preying…

She would create fake wills naming herself as the beneficiary. Amy Archer-Gilligan At Amy Archer-Gilligan’s home “for elderly people and chronic invalids’’ in Windsor, Connecticut, boarders had a tendency to die at an alarming rate—a dozen people passed away between 1907 and 1910, with the rate accelerating to 48 deaths between 1911 and 1916. When the sister of Franklin Andrews, who died after loaning $500 to Archer-Gilligan, became suspicious, police investigated, finding the man had not succumbed to an ulcer as Archer-Gilligan claimed, but of arsenic poisoning. “Police Believe Archer Home for Aged a Murder Factory,” read a Hartford Courant headline as authorities arrested the prim and proper proprietor, alleging that among her victims were her own two husbands. Her second spouse, wealthy Michael Gilligan, had died in 1914, three…

“We have never stopped working on this case,” Steve Bellone, Suffolk County executive, told reporters in July 2023. Wearing a short-sleeve shirt and tan pants on a hot summer evening, the tall, heavyset man walks down Fifth Avenue, his left hand in his pocket with a satchel over his shoulder. He could have been any one of countless office workers on an ordinary night in Manhattan, attan, but for the three men following him. They are dressed in dark business suits and dark ties, like characters from Men in Black. Near a crosswalk, they confront the man. There’s a tense discussion. Then the man is taken away. The men in suits are FBI agents; the man is a suspected serial killer. On July 13, 2023, a 13-year investigation culminated in…

Rex Heuermann’s longtime wife, Asa Ellerup, has been plunged into a “waking surreal nightmare,” according to her attorney. Her quiet suburban life on Long Island in New York has been jolted by the incendiary charges, not to mention a police search that ransacked her home. Ellerup has also been pummeled with questions about her own innocence. How could she not have known her husband of 27 years was the man prosecutors claim he is: a vicious murderer preying on sex workers. Ellerup’s attorney insists she was totally in the dark about the architect’s “complete double life” and evidence shows that she was out of town when most of the killings took place. Shortly after her husband’s arrest, Ellerup—who has not been charged or named as a suspect in any of…

Pedro López, the world’s most prolific serial killer, walked out of a psychiatric facility in Colombia in 1998 and has never been seen again. Known as the Monster of the Andes for preying on mostly poor young Indigenous girls, López had gone on a killing spree from 1969 to 1980 across Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, at one point averaging a horrifying three victims a week. “I walked among the markets searching for a girl with a certain look on her face. A look of innocence and beauty,” he told a journalist in 1994. “She would be a good girl, always working with her mother. I followed them, sometimes for two or three days, da: waiting for the moment when she was left alone.” Targeting girls between the ages of 9…

For years, authorities ignored numerous suspicions about Dorothea Puente. Federal parole officers visited the Sacramento, California, landlady’s boardinghouse 14 times in three years, and each time gave her the all-clear. If only they had looked a little more closely—and asked a few more probing questions—they would have discovered the horrors that had taken place there. But then it was easy to give Puente the benefit of the doubt. The 64-year-old was kindly, grandmotherly and soft-spoken, and she seemed to embrace society’s outcasts—the addicts and alcoholics, the poor and the homeless, the old and sick—giving them a place to live in her two-story Victorian-style home when nobody else would. It wasn’t just the visiting officials who were fooled. Over the years, Puente became a respected figure in the Hispanic community by…

They called it “The Murder Game.” For sexual thrills, the two lovers would choose their victims—patients in the nursing home where they worked—based on their initials, then kill them, until they were able to spell out M-U-R-D-E-R. When that became too difficult, Catherine Wood and Gwendolyn Graham based their game on the phrase “You’ll be mine forever and five days,” with each murder counting as a day. By the time their twisted game ended in early 1997, the pair had met their kill quota—and perhaps more—leaving a trail of death at the Alpine Manor nursing home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and an enduring mystery of what actually happened. Graham was a newly hired nursing aide in 1986 and Wood was her boss when they met. They soon became friends and…

The sisters tortured their victims on a cama real (royal bed), a narrow board on which girls were placed and wrapped in barbed wire. Heartless Sisters In the 1950s and 1960s, sisters Delfina, Maria de Jesús, Carmen and Luisa Valenzuela ran a prostitution ring out of the Rancho El Ángel brothel in Guanajuato, Mexico. They found women by placing help-wanted ads for maids then forcing respondents into prostitution. To keep workers under their control, the sisters plied them with cocaine and heroin against their will and beat and starved them. If the women still resisted—or got too old or ill—the sisters killed them. In 1964, the siblings were convicted of murdering at least 80 women and sentenced to 40 years each. Delfina and Carmen died in prison, while Luisa lost…

Shortly before he was sent to the gallows, H.H. Holmes looked at his reflection in the mirror and had an epiphany, saying, “I believe fully that I am growing to resemble the devil.” Few would disagree. But was he as bad as he claimed? The charming, intelligent and cold-blooded Holmes is usually described as one of America’s earliest and most prolific serial killers, credited with hundreds of murders in the late 1800s, some carried out in his “Murder Castle,” where he was said to have knocked out his victims with gas from hidden jets in their rooms, then incinerated or melted their bodies in acid. The reputation of a man who came to be known as “the Beast of Chicago” was perpetuated by sensational newspaper accounts of the day and…

On April 10, 1834, a fire broke out in one of the French Quarter’s most stately homes, the LaLaurie mansion. New Orleans police, firemen and neighbors raced to the scene hoping to rescue survivors. They instead stumbled upon a totally different kind of nightmare. In the kitchen, they found a 70-year-old cook chained to the stove, and in the upstairs slave quarters, behind a bolted door, they discovered seven other slaves, their bodies ravaged with wounds and shackled to the wall by their necks. The blaze brought to light what many privately suspected: The mansion’s owners, socialite Marie Delphine LaLaurie and her third husband, physician Leonard LaLaurie, brutally abused their domestic servants. Even by the standards of the pre-Civil War South, where the enslavement of human beings had been an…

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They became known as the Gilgo Four, women in their 20s connected by their work as prostitutes and their murders by an apparent serial killer, with their skeletal remains turning up around Gilgo Beach on the South Shore of Long Island, New York, but they were not the only possible victims. Police also found the body of a toddler, an Asian man and other women in their search of the area. Investigations into their identities and possible links to the Long Island Serial Killer are ongoing. The Gilgo Four Maureen Brainard-Barnes The first of the Gilgo Four victims, the 25-year-old Connecticut woman worked as an escort out of Manhattan motels, advertising on Craigslist and Backpage. She was last heard from on July 9, 2007, when she phoned a friend to…

In 2002, Katherine Shepherd, a 26-year-old interior designer, moved to New York from San Jose, California, to launch her career. She shared office space in a midtown Manhattan building with architect Rex Heuermann, whom police have charged in the Gilgo Beach Serial Killer case. What were your first impressions of him? He’s a big man, a great big man in my eyes, very intimidating physically. He was very loud and likes to talk. The women who worked for him said he was kind of a know-it-all, a little pompous, but nothing violent. It is not like he had anger issues or anything like that. But I saw him as a gentle giant. He never seemed like anybody who would hurt anyone. I just felt like he was a really nice…

Researching a book about a string of unsolved murders around Seattle, true crime author Ann Rule learned that police in Utah had arrested a suspect named Theodore Robert Bundy in 1975 for kidnapping but believed he may also have done much worse. Rule, who had worked with Bundy at a suicide hotline center, refused to believe that the charming, intelligent good-looking man who was a good listener and prevented several deaths could actually be a homicidal maniac. “I was holding out hope that he was innocent,” she told the Houston Chronicle, “that somehow this all was a terrible mistake.” Born in Vermont to a woman in an unwed mothers’ home, Bundy was raised for a time by grandparents who pretended to be his parents and told him his mother was…

A shadowy California serial killer of the 1960s and 1970s—linked to five murders, though taking credit for dozens more—taunted police by sending cryptic letters with ciphers and a bull’s-eye symbol. As with Jack the Ripper in England (see page 84), the Zodiac Killer used a pseudonym in his notes, sending cryptograms that he said would reveal his identity if solved. He demanded that the puzzles be printed on the front pages of newspapers and once threatened to “cruise around all weekend killing lone people in the night” if the media failed to do so. In his final communique, which was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in January 1974, he included an unusual symbol and the words “Me = 37, SFPD = 0,” but investigators say evidence points to a much…

Samuel Doss of Oklahoma was cheap and uptight. His new wife, Nannie, wasn’t. So, when Samuel kept objecting to his wife spending money on what he considered to be frivolous romance magazines, Nannie left him. But Samuel missed his bride and begged her to return with promises he’d change his ways and loosen the purse strings. Nannie returned to Samuel in September 1954, and the couple celebrated their reconciliation over Samuel’s favorite dish, his wife’s homemade prune cake. Overnight, Samuel got violently sick with burning pains in his stomach. After several weeks in the hospital for the mysterious ailment, he returned home, was treated to another meal by his wife, and got sick again. This time, he didn’t survive. Hours after the death of Samuel Doss on Oct. 12, 1954,…

I hope he loves me and will marry me some day,” 18-year-old Myra Hindley wrote in her diary of Ian Brady, her co-worker at Millwards Merchandise, a chemical distribution company in England. It was 1961 and Hindley, a secretary, had fallen hard for the skinny stock clerk. They did become a couple, bound by something much darker than love. She dyed her hair platinum blond, posed for naked photos and read books he gave her about Nazi atrocities. And then, at his urging, she agreed to help him commit murder. Hindley lured 16-year-old Pauline Reade, a friend of her sister, into a van and drove her out to the moors where Brady raped the girl and slashed her throat with a knife. This was the first of five murders of victims…

With poverty, overcrowding and crime running amok, London’s grimy Whitechapel district was the setting for a throat-slashing mutilator in the late 1800s. Jack the Ripper, as the menace became known, preyed on prostitutes living and working in these slums. The serial killer not only cut the women’s throats but disemboweled them, too—in one case removing a uterus, bladder and vagina—leading police to believe that the murderer had some knowledge of human anatomy. As terror spread across London, the police’s Scotland Yard headquarters, as well as the press, began receiving handwritten letters from a person claiming to be the culprit. The nickname Jack the Ripper came from the signature at the end of the “From Hell” letter, which had been sent to Whitechapel Vigilance Committee Chairman George Lusk in October 1888…

They looked like any other frontier family, the father John “Pa” Bender, wife Elvira “Ma” Bender, and their grown children, John Jr. and Kate, settling in a remote corner of Kansas where they ran a one-room creekside inn for travelers. Not long after they opened for business in Labette County in 1871, however, rumors circulated in the region that people who checked into their establishment had never been seen again. This was not initially cause for alarm. Folks frequently fell off the map in the Old West due to disease, violence or just to escape their former lives. Then a guest named William York went missing in March 1873. York happened to be the brother of a Kansas politician who wasn’t going to let the matter drop, leading a search…

As the story goes, a fortuneteller once informed Leonarda Cianciulli, of Correggio, Italy, that she would marry and bear many children, then endure a mother’s worst nightmare, seeing all of her children die—and die young. Cianciulli did indeed get married, at age 23 to a government clerk in 1917, and had 17 pregnancies. Three of the children died in miscarriages and 10 later died in their youth. Fearful that the fortuneteller’s prophecy was coming true, Cianciulli became fiercely protective of her surviving four children. When her oldest son, Giuseppe, joined the Italian army to prepare for World War II, his mother became so desperate to protect him that she turned to black magic. “That woman was really sweet,” Leonarda Cianciulli said of one of her victims whose blood she used…